SBIR Phase I: Harnessing Untapped Food-borne Microbial Diversity to Rationally Engineer Novel Healthy Foods

该SBIR项目的更广泛/商业影响是验证开发新型发酵食品的技术和商业可行性，以解决与肠易激综合征（IBS）相关的潜在机制。 IBS是一种高度破坏性和流行的疾病，困扰着大约3200万美国人。从技术上讲，将首次验证合理设计具有确定菌株含量和特定健康和营养益处的新型发酵食品的能力。在商业上，消费者的口味和接受度也将得到验证，以确保产品的强劲市场需求。如果成功，该提案将更广泛地验证一个新的平台，用于设计具有各种理想特性的合理发酵食品，包括改善健康和营养质量，更强大的保存，以及有针对性地去除特定化合物/毒素。虽然最初的疾病目标是IBS，但还有许多其他慢性疾病与微生物组有很强的关联性;这些支出占美国医疗保健支出的90%（近4万亿美元），并提出了一个迫切的创新领域，这个平台可以有力地影响，小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目建议开发一个新的平台，以精确地设计具有确定的微生物和代谢物含量的新型发酵食品，以改善人类健康。发酵食品很有希望通过各种既定机制影响宿主肠道和微生物组，并且具有高代谢活性剂量的微生物和递送多种菌株沿着其相关生物活性代谢物的能力的优势。然而，一个关键的技术障碍是，目前不可能精确地定义发酵食品的菌株和代谢物含量。 该提案通过利用微生物菌株分离、基因组表征和高通量筛选方面的最新进展来应对这一挑战。首先，下一代菌株分离技术将应用于食源性微生物，以开发一个大型且深入表征的以前无法访问的微生物菌株生物库。然后将筛选菌株对特定宿主和微生物组机制的活性。然后将铅菌株以商业规模配制成食品，并确认菌株的存在及其相关健康特性的保留。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader/commercial impact of this SBIR project is to validate the technical and commercial viability of developing a novel fermented food to address underlying mechanisms associated with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). IBS is a highly disruptive and prevalent disease afflicting approximately 32 million Americans. Technically, the ability to rationally design a novel fermented food with defined strain content and specific health and nutritional benefits will be validated for the first time. Commercially, the taste and acceptability for consumers will also be verified to ensure strong market demand for the product. If successful, this proposal will more broadly validate a novel platform for designing rationally fermented foods with a variety of desirable properties, including improved health and nutritional qualities, more robust preservation, and targeted removal of specific compounds/toxins. Although the initial disease target is IBS, there are many other chronic diseases with strong associative links to the microbiome; these now constitute 90% of U.S. health care spending (nearly $4 trillion) and present an urgent area for innovation that this platform could powerfully impact, both domestically and abroad.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new platform to precisely engineer novel fermented foods with defined microbial and metabolite content to improve human health. Fermented foods have great promise to impact the host gut and microbiome through a variety of established mechanisms, and have the advantage of high, metabolically active doses of microbes and the ability to deliver multiple strains along with their associated bioactive metabolites. However, a key technical hurdle is that it is not currently possible to precisely define the strain and metabolite content of a fermented food. This proposal addresses this challenge by leveraging recent advances in microbial strain isolation, genomic characterization and high throughput screening. First, next-generation strain isolation techniques will be applied to food-borne microbes to develop a large and deeply characterized biobank of previously inaccessible microbial strains. The strains will then be screened for activity on specific host and microbiome mechanisms. Lead strains will then be formulated into a food at commercial scale, and the presence of the strains as well as retention of their associated health properties will be confirmed. Finally, the taste profile will be validated.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.