GATC Biotech and ETH Zurich to Establish Method for Food Quality Assurance

GATC Biotech, in collaboration with the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), is developing a cost efficient method for taxonomic characterization of microbial communities present in food.

This industry related application, which is realised at GATC Biotech in Konstanz, aims to explore the causes for spoilage of cheese during industrial production and analyzes the complexity in bacterial populations, providing general understanding about spoilage of biological goods.

GATC Biotech will establish new methods for quality assurance that will provide valuable information concerning food safety quality control, optimization of production yields as well as food production processes. This quality assurance method will be applicable to many other industrial feed or food production fields, e.g. in fisheries, butcheries, breweries, or wherever production is based on directed formation of complex microbial ecological systems in goods.

“The project will be performed by multiplatform sequencing, using all leading sequencing technologies, including our latest acquisition, the PacBio RS from Pacific Biosciences”, explains Dr. Kerstin Stangier, Director Business Development at GATC Biotech. “With this new third generation sequencing technology, DNA and RNA of a consortium of microbial population can be sequenced at a time - including epigenome sequencing and characterization. We are therefore able to provide a time- and cost-effective method in accordance to GATC Biotech’s declared aim to offer our customers the best possible value for their sequencing projects.”

The Metatxn Project is funded by the BMWi (Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology) with around 120,000 Euros.