Microbial bioinformatics for food safety and production

Abstract

In the production of fermented foods, microbes play an important role. Optimization of fermentation processes or starter culture production traditionally was a trial-and-error approach inspired by expert knowledge of the fermentation process. Current developments in high-throughput 'omics' technologies allow developing more rational approaches to improve fermentation processes both from the food functionality as well as from the food safety perspective. Here, the authors thematically review typical bioinformatics techniques and approaches to improve various aspects of the microbial production of fermented food products and food safety.

Keywords: bioinformatics; food, genomics; microorganisms; predictive models.

Figure 1.

Data and bioinformatics applied in food application areas. Central in this figure are the food application areas (right panel). From organisms, different data sets can be obtained (data reservoir); their abbreviation is given within parentheses. Middle panel: one (of many important) methods and other methods/data sources (see Table 1 for an explanation) relevant for a main application area shown. Interpretation example: for safety assessment, genomes (G), literature (L) and phenotypes (H) are used with the gene function annotation (2.3), orthology (2.4), comparative genomics (2.5) and predicting phenotypes (4) techniques (see Table 1).