International Programs
The FFHI considers multi-disciplinary collaboration to be the engine that promotes creative research and drives commercial innovation. The International Program consolidates alliances with national and international organizations to enhance the research programs and collaborating scientists at UC Davis. FFHI assists in networking, identifying common shared research interests, recruiting complementary skills and promoting translation goals. The program is assisting research programs at FFHI via exchanges of PhD students, Post-Doctoral researchers and professors with the following countries:
DENMARK: Oligosaccharides and Milk Genomics
This project, in collaboration with the University of Aarhus, University of Copenhagen and the Centre for Advanced Food Studies (LMC) is actively investigating the diversity of free bioactive oligosaccharides according to genetic variants in bovine breeds in Denmark and Sweden.
This project is identifying and characterizing the naturally occurring genetic variants in animals according to different functional and nutritional features in milk composition. By integrating genomic, proteomic and metabolomic techniques the project is gaining insights into the biochemical basis of variations in composition of milk as quality traits. The project is developing metabolomic tools and applying them to milk with the goal of discovering variations in the metabolite profile of milk, which in turn contribute to the technological and health quality traits of the milk. Currently Ulrik Kræmer Sundekilde, a PhD student from Aarhus University, is in residence at the Foods for Health Institute as a member of the Exchange Program. A Steering Committee comprising members of the FFHI and Copenhagen University and The Innovation Center Denmark/Silicon Valley has been constituted to foster research developments.
PhD students and Postdocs can now send applications to participate in the selection for a research Exchange Program in Denmark. Main topics of research will include milk genomics and beer bioactive components.
Applicants can send a short CV to dbarile@ucdavis.edu.
IRELAND: Bioactive Molecules from Dairy Streams
Food for Health Ireland (FHI) has formed a unique partnership between four of Ireland’s major dairy processing companies and four public research institutions. This newly founded organization aims to study and exploit milk ingredients to deliver health benefits for consumers and add value to Irish Agriculture.
FFHI and the Teagasc- Moorepark Food Research Centre research have formed a partnership to design dairy streams to obtain fractions enriched in bioactive oligosaccharides. The industrial-scale pilot plant available at Moorepark in Ireland complements the advanced mass spectrometry analytical capabilities and biological function research at UC Davis. This project represents a key collaboration designed to bring scientific discoveries in the laboratory into practice in commercial products.
The development of novel engineering systems capable of unique separation processes will enable the use of oligosaccharides for commercial development as unique food ingredients.
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ITALY: Screening for Bioactive Molecules in Traditional Fermented Foods
Milk and cultured dairy products have long been recognized to provide unique benefits to various immunological processes. However cultured milk is a massively complex biological system and neither the specific molecules, nor the basic mechanisms underlying these observations are known. Collaborating scientists from FFHI, the Faculties of Pharmacy from the University of Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro” and University of Cagliari are identifying the molecules, biological mechanisms, and consequences to specific immunological processes of milk and traditional cultured dairy products. This challenging project, has assembled a diverse group of collaborators an expertise located at the UC David Genome Center. Eric Gershwin (Department of Internal Medicine, UC Davis) is studying the immuno-modulatory effects of the novel bioactive molecules identified and Jonathan Eisen (Genome Center-Section of Evolution and Ecology, UC Davis) is applying his expertise in the Metagenomics field to gain detailed genomic information on the microbial communities inhabiting cultured dairy products. This multidisciplinary approach is emblematic of the FFHI vision for research collaborations.
Matteo Bordiga from the University of Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro” is currently in residence at the Foods for Health Institute as part of a PhD Student exchange program.
FRANCE
INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, is the leading Institute for Agricultural Research in Europe. INRA’s mission is to promote competitive and sustainable agriculture and a healthy diet. Research at the center of Jouy-en-Josas (Paris), is particularly focused on animal biology, microbiology, integrative biology and genetics. Studies include, for example, the improvement of breeding populations using biotechnologies of reproduction and genetics, with applications from human nutrition to the improvement of ruminant and human microbiology.
Our collaboration with the team at Jouy-en-Josas is actively investigating the correlation between genetic polymorphisms of goat milk proteins and the expression of targeted bioactive molecules in milk.
Mickael Meyrand, from INRA in Paris, has recently joined the Foods for Health Institute as Junior Specialist.
CANADA
The Advanced Food Materials Network (AFMNet) serves to unify food research programs across Canada to accelerate scientific discoveries and their translation to practice. FFHI is working with AFMNet to develop joint programs in automated health records and mathematical models of metabolic health.
NuGO
The European Nutrigenomics Organization NuGO is a Network of Excellence in the EU Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technology. Their broad mission of advancing nutrigenomics research across Europe has matured into a global activity promoting nutrition and health research using modern systems biology tools. FFHI is working with NuGO to build and annotate databases of diet-responsive genes and diagnostic metabolic pathways of human health.
IMGC
The International Milk Genomic Consortium (IMGC) was created in 2003 with the goal to bring together the science of milk, lactation, nutrition and genetics
Recognizing the opportunity to use lactation as a model and a starting point to understand human health, the IMGC brought together world-class scientists from USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and more.
IMGC studies Lactation from every aspect to discover how milk works and why it is so valuable to evolution. To accelerate the knowledge exchange a unique web portal based at UC Davis coordinates bioinformatic data collection and analysis and exchange. The IMGC Web Portal provides a virtual environment in which members of the international milk and lactation research community collaborate to understand the biological processes underlying mammalian milk genomics, the biological products that result from milk and lactation genes, and the health traits that these biological processes and products confer to mothers and infants. The IMGC portal was instrumental in annotating the lactation genes as a part of the recent world wide Bovine Sequencing Project.
