Microorganisms (MO) impact food production systems at many levels from native symbionts that improve crop yields to bacteria that produce fermented foods. Their use can help reduce pesticide and fertilizer use and prevent food waste, amongst other goals in the Farm2Fork Strategy. In order to do so, we first need to isolate, characterize and apply the most beneficial MO.
The MicrobesToFunction project will develop the essential tools and core competences to study microbiomes of agricultural and nutritional relevance, aiming to characterize the most relevant isolates. Starting with genomes and metagenomes, we use in-house tools to contextualize them with public genomic and multi-omics data, aiming to reconstruct their metabolism, discover novel pathways and understand their role in the interaction with their hosts or food production systems. Longer-term goals are to i) identify the best-suited strains for specific uses, ii) test microbial consortia for applications in sustainable agriculture, safe food production and plant breeding, and iii) predict the outcome of microbiome interventions.