Microbiome Research
Food and Human Microbiomes
Microbiome represents the community of microorganisms that can be found living together in any environment; they can potentially either be helpful or harmful. Our microbiomes affect our life and health, even our habits and mood.
Food Microbiome
For better health and taste
Microbial innovations can enhance food's sensory and nutritional properties, extend shelf-life, and provide sustainable ingredients.
Our current food system has the potential to evolve and better support global dietary needs in a sustainable way. A novel, and at the same time, forgotten approach is to use microorganisms as a food-modifying solution.
Microorganisms affect sensory and nutritional properties of food, help to increase shelf-life, and could be an innovative approach to create new highly functional and nutritional ingredients which also provide a low carbon footprint. If you want to better understand the complex network of food microbiome (its composition and microbes' interactions), identify food spoilers, or, on the contrary, beneficiary bugs, isolate bacterial strains and characterize them, or simply use these hard-working guys for you, just ask for help from us.
We will help to decipher microbial communities with next generation sequencing, solve the riddle of their interactions, and find the microorganisms specifically for your needs. The microbial food revolution is waiting for its active participants and we are ready to support you!
Success Stories
What have we done
The products we develope have
balanced macronutrient profile, additional functional properties, they are gut-friendly, improve well-being, and healthier lifestyle.
Some product segments we have developed in cooperation with the biggest Estonian food industries:
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Healthy functional yogurts enriched with fiber
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Functional soups enriched with vitamins and minerals
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Functional Near Water beverages
Human Microbiome
More than 2500 Estonian gut microbiome identified
Did you know that there are more microbial cells in our body than human cells?
Indeed, recent research shows that the typical adult human body consists of about 30 trillion human cells and about 38 trillion bacteria. They are playing a critical role in our everyday life. Human Microbiome Research is a quickly expanding field that is ready to boom.
Our gut bugs live their life, eat their food, and fulfill their functions, good or bad.
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How to feed them to make them happy?
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How to improve your health by modifying your gut microbiota by food or beyond it?
We have expertise in gut microbiome identification, we can guess about consequences of a diet change and answer how your innovative functional food will affect your microbiome, health, and mood. All these and even more can be resolved by a specifically designed nutritional intervention study, the size of it depending on you. We can organize everything from scratch. But the bigger is better.
And one small secret to disclose. If you are not ready for human trials, we also offer a unique human in vitro gut model. Ask for more information!
Our Services
Next generation sequencing
Human in vitro gut model
Our Microbiome Research Team, consisting of food scientists, microbiologists, nutritional therapists, and bioinformaticians all of whom will support you with:
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food microbiota analysis,
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microbial resilience and fluctuation in time, or
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tailored microbial solutions to resolve your problems;
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design and implement human nutritional interventional studies.
We use next generation sequencing methodology supported by metagenomic annotation and modelling.
As a bridge between food development and analytics, we conduct human nutrition intervention studies, focusing on the effect of functional food consumption on gut microbiota and adding an additional value to your product.
We start from the appropriate design, creation of focus groups, application for ethical approval, execution of the intervention, and data analysis.
We offer a complete solution, accompanied by fast delivery of the results and highly motivated and experienced researchers who have been involved in several innovative projects.
Research Projects and Programs
The Microbiome Research group is a contributor to a Horizon Europe-funded research project DOMINO aiming to understand the complex interaction network inside of fermented food microbiomes and attribute their health benefits. Our case study is focused on fermented vegetables where we want to introduce a novel approach for innovation in plant-based products.
To date, we have completed three intervention studies and are in the process of publishing another which focuses on the impact of fermented vegetable intake for three different focus group consumers.
We actively participate in various European programs. COST action CA23110, International networking on in vitro colon models simulating gut microbiota-mediated interactions.
Our group actively collaborates with various microbiome initiatives. We have been involved in an interlaboratory study comparing various protocols for microbiome metagenomic sequencing and in establishing the 1st international reference reagent for DNA extraction of the gut microbiome standard together with WHO Expert Committee on Biological Standardization.
We have created and validated a modified amplicon sequencing protocol that can discriminate viable and dead microbes from food matrices and estimate their bacterial abundance. Using this approach, we created additional value for 16S rRNA NGS and characterised various food products.
Microbiome Research Group is looking forward to exciting collaboration opportunities
"I am very enthusiastic about the Microbiome field and what it can bring to people. Promoting applied research for our society's needs is the most important mission for me"
Jekaterina Kazantseva, PhD
Head of Microbiome Research Group