Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Just in time! Using personal and contextual data to stimulate healthy behavior through adaptive interventions: Theoretical framework, technological building blocks and empirical evidence." "Nathalie Dens" "Internet Data Lab (IDLab), Media, ICT and interpersonal relations in Organisations and Society (MIOS), Marketing" "Behavioral economics provides a relevant theoretical framework that can explain and predict individuals' seemingly irrational choices with respect to their health. By understanding individuals as non-rational actors with predictable biases, individuals can be guided or ""nudged"" toward wiser choices without restricting their choice freedom or significantly changing their economic incentives. The current project focuses on two complementary health risk behaviors, (un)healthy eating and physical (in)activity, and analyses how persuasive cues or 'nudges' can be applied to interactive, 'just-in-time' (JIT) interventions that are adapted to an individuals' unique characteristics, needs and context. To date, a major gap still exists between the technological capacity to deliver adaptive communications, existing theoretical behavioral frameworks and current applications. The main goal of the project is to close this gap by developing and testing an integrative theoretical framework on how just-in-time adaptive interventions affect individuals' health risk behaviors, by (i) adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, (ii) developing the main technological building blocks that enable these JIT adaptive interventions and (iii) testing the effectiveness of different interventions for different individuals in different contexts." "Parental Pesticide and Offspring Epigenome study (PaPOE): Assessment of pesticides exposure and association with cancer among farmers, pregnant women and their offspring" "Lode Godderis" "Environment and Health" "Environmental toxicants, like pesticides, can alter epigenetic regulatory features such as DNA methylation. The PaPOE (Parental Pesticides and Offspring Epigenome) study aims to investigate whether pesticides exposure could induce epigenetic changes associated with an increase in cancer risk. We will, in fact be, investigating how (re)programming in early life can have long-term consequences for later health outcomes through DNA methylation mechanism, making a link between parental pesticides exposure, transgenerational effects and offspring’s health risks. With this study, we will gain insight on the effect of occupational exposure to pesticides on DNA methylation and potentially identify biomarkers at birth that can mediate carcinogenesis." "Investigations on selected natural product classes as inhibitors of Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs) and modulators of autophagy" "Luc Pieters" "Natural Products and Food - Research and Analysis (NatuRA)" "During previous investigations in the host laboratory it has been found that several classes of natural products, i.e. polymethoxy-flavones, biflavonoids, xanthones and quinazoline alkaloids, exhibited AGEs inhibiting properties. AGEs (or Advanced Glycation Endproducts) are implicated in many age-related chronic diseases and in protein ageing, and are associated with diabeticcomplications, atherosclerosis, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and the normal ageing processes. AGEs have been found to induce autophagy, a favourable subcellular process contributing to cellular homeostasis and adaptation to stress by removing damaged or unwanted intracellular material. Similar to AGEs, autophagy has been associated with different pathologicalconditions including heart disease, cancer and neurodegeneration. Autophagy is stimulated in atherosclerosis and in oxidative stress conditions. Therefore, AGEs inhibition and modulation of autophagy were selected as targets to be evaluated and to establish structure-activity relationships for the product classes mentioned above. Both AGEs inhibition and modulation of autophagy are relatively new targets in natural product research. AGEs inhibitors and inducers of autophagy, or a combination of both, may be potentially useful products against degenerative diseases in a broad sense, such as the ones mentioned above." "PurpleTech – Purple bacteria cleantech for the production of nutritional protein." "Siegfried Vlaeminck" "Sustainable Energy, Air and Water Technology (DuEL)" "By 2050, the global demand for nutritional protein will increase by about 50%. Yet, the boundaries of environmental sustainability are already severely trespassed in the traditional fertilizer-feed-food chain and in fish-meal based aquaculture. Around the world, researchers have taken up the quest for novel, sustainable protein foods. Recovering and recycling renewable resources from waste streams is one of the key steps to mitigate the environmental impact. In single cell protein (SCP) production, both societal needs perfectly match, as microbial technology is probably the most resource-efficient manner of producing nutritional protein.In this new era of (meta)transcriptomics and (meta)proteomics, we start to see a glimpse of all the biological features that can be steered. This provides a strong incentive to revisit SCP, for the first time with a fundamental and mechanistically driven approach, exploiting not only the potential of a microbial cell to its fullest, but also the even richer genetic pool of a microbial community.Purple non-sulfur bacteria (PNSB) are nutritionally one of the most attractive types of SCP, and are furthermore metabolically the most versatile organisms on the planet. Each type of (sub)metabolism represents distinct (meta)proteomes, and hence nutritional properties such as essential amino acid profile, gastro-intestinal digestibility and nucleic acid content. Biotechnologically, the controllability of autotrophically grown PNSB communities is completely unexplored. A set of 9 tools has been distilled from a number of biological and ecological response mechanisms. In brief, it is hypothesized based on recent proteomic data that different cellular responses can drastically influence the nutritional quality. At the level of the microbial community, the objective is to synergistically make use of the full richness of the metaproteome and metatranscriptome of several PNSB and non-PNSB populations. PurpleMENU bridges environmental biotechnology to sustainable chemistry and nutrition sciences. Hereby key insights are unraveled that serve as the basis for novel bioprocesses, and perhaps for global food security and sustainability." "Point-of-care device based on KETs for diagnosis of food allergies (AllerScreening)." "Didier Ebo" "Immunology, Translational Pathophysiological Research (TPR)" "Food allergy constitutes a significant health issue with important cant morbidity and mortality. This multicentric project (AllerScreening) aims at evaluating the reliability of a novel multiplexed IgE binding assay in the diagnosis of various IgE-mediated food allergies." "Revisiting Cocoa: Exploiting the full potential of cocoa raw materials through novel processing (REVICO)." "Luc Pieters" "Natural Products and Food - Research and Analysis (NatuRA)" "REVICO aims to develop innovative fermentation and downstream processing methods to allow a sustainable and optimal use of various cocoa bean components and their specific applications, in particular regarding flavour and health-promoting components." "BrewPro: Multi-stage microbial technology for the cost-effective production of high-quality animal feed on brewery effluents." "Siegfried Vlaeminck" "Sustainable Energy, Air and Water Technology (DuEL)" "By 2050, the global demand for nutritional protein will increase by about 50%. Yet, the boundaries of environmental sustainability are already severely trespassed in the traditional food-supply chain. Locally recovering resources from waste streams is one of the key steps to reduce environmental impact while creating import independency (e.g. soybean). In single cell protein (SCP) production, these societal needs perfectly match, as microbial technology is probably the most resource-efficient manner of producing nutritional protein. Wastewater from the food processing industry provides an excellent target for upgrading, such as brewery wastewater. The BrewPro project aims to develop a process that for the first time would allow to tune the protein quantity and quality of aerobic heterotrophic bacteria. This should enable cost-effective harvesting and post-processing, yielding a nutritionally attractive ingredient for animal feed preparations. The concept is based in a multiple stage anaerobic/aerobic bioreactor. As such, BrewPro wants to strengthen food sustainability and security through smart management of secondary resources." "Purple Microbes for Eco-friendly NUtrition – PurpleMENU." "Siegfried Vlaeminck" "Sustainable Energy, Air and Water Technology (DuEL)" "By 2050, the global demand for nutritional protein will increase by about 50%. Yet, the boundaries of environmental sustainability are already severely trespassed in the traditional fertilizer-feed-food chain and in fish-meal based aquaculture. Around the world, researchers have taken up the quest for novel, sustainable protein foods. Recovering and recycling renewable resources from waste streams is one of the key steps to mitigate the environmental impact. In single cell protein (SCP) production, both societal needs perfectly match, as microbial technology is probably the most resource-efficient manner of producing nutritional protein. In this new era of (meta)transcriptomics and (meta)proteomics, we start to see a glimpse of all the biological features that can be steered. This provides a strong incentive to revisit SCP, for the first time with a fundamental and mechanistically driven approach, exploiting not only the potential of a microbial cell to its fullest, but also the even richer genetic pool of a microbial community. Purple non-sulfur bacteria (PNSB) are nutritionally one of the most attractive types of SCP, and are furthermore metabolically the most versatile organisms on the planet. Each type of (sub)metabolism represents distinct (meta)proteomes, and hence nutritional properties such as essential amino acid profile, gastro-intestinal digestibility and nucleic acid content. Biotechnologically, the controllability of autotrophically grown PNSB communities is completely unexplored. PurpleMENU bridges environmental biotechnology to sustainable chemistry and nutrition sciences. Hereby key insights are unraveled that serve as the basis for novel bioprocesses, and perhaps for global food security and sustainability." "Urban pre-Composter, decentralized pre-treatment of organic waste." "Els Du Bois" "Industrial Vision Lab (InViLab), Sustainable Energy, Air and Water Technology (DuEL), Product development" "The Urban pre-Composter is a public underground system that is used to collect organic waste in an urban context. The added value of this innovative concept is the ability to pretreat the waste in order to reduce its volume. Consequently, less transportation is needed to carry this waste. This directly implies that the environmental impact on these cities will be reduced, and in addition on social domain, the concept reduced the amount of hindrance and annoyance that is currently related to waste collection. During this project the aim is to convert and improve the design into a verified installation concept that can be commercialized." "Fermented vegetable juices – Microbiome analysis and their probiotic potential?" "Ingmar Claes" "Environmental Ecology & Applied Microbiology (ENdEMIC)" "Naturally fermented vegetable juices have known a recent 'revival'. It becomes more and more clear that contactwith a diverse group of bacterial species is necessary for the proper development of our immune system('Hygiene Hypothesis). After the start of our Citizen Science project 'Ferme Pekes' with 40 participants from the Antwerp area, we would like to proceed with the analyses of al these samples and further extent the research to investigate the robustness of these fermentations. Within this background, we will analyse the microbial composition in fermented vegetable juices and look at the probiotic potential of specific isolates."