UGAL group collaborated with the Finnish partner (University of Helsinki) to make further steps in revealing the resistance mechanism of L. monocytogenes to high hydrostatic pressure (HHP).

The infrastructure of the TehnIA pilot stations at the Faculty of Food Science and Engineering was involved with the HPP equipment in the experiments developed in collaboration with the Finish partner.

Leontina Grigore Gurgu, who is our specialist in genetics, visited the Institute of Biotechnology from the University of Helsinki. Her visit lasted from 11.02.2018 to 1.03.2018 and was coordinated by the Research Director of this institution, Dr. Petri Auvinen, one of our SafeFood partners. Leontina’s visit was focused on bioinformatics methods for analysis of data produced with state of art NGS platforms developed in the institution. She has been tutored on day-to-day basis by Dr. Margarita Andreevskaya and M.Sc. Ilhan Cem Duru. Now, Leontina knows how to perform RNAseq analysis reaching from the primary data handling through QC, mapping, differential gene expression analysis followed by GO class enrichment analysis filtering the most relevant features among the gene expression data projected to metabolic pathways. The genomics related tools are generic and can be applied to any organism one studies. This visit was supported by the PN-III- P1-1.1-MC-2017-2418 project financed by UEFISCDI, but Leontina’s new expertise will be used in the SafeFood project too.

Leontina Grigore-Gurgu and Florentina Ionela Bucur returned from the Institute of Microbiology and  Biotehnology from the University of Ulm, Germany, where they had a hands-on training regarding genome editing using “gene knockout” based on CRISPRi and “gene deletion” based on chromosomal mutagenesis using two vectors (pORI280SacBmut and pVE6007), the second one being thermo-sensitive.

Daniela Borda and Florentina Bucur represented UGAL at the Annual Meeting of the SafeFood Consortium that took place from 4^th to 5^th of September 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. The meeting was hosted by the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB).

Florentina Bucur made an oral presentation on Survival mechanisms of the foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes at the 5th edition of the Scientific Conference organized by the Doctoral Schools of Dunarea de Jos University of Galati, organized during 8^th - 9^th of June 2017, in Galati, Romania. With this occasion she talked about the SafeFood project, which aims to reveal the mechanism that listeria use to survive during treatments at high pressures.

On the 13^th of June 2017, Anca Nicolau, who is the institutional responsible for FoodSafe project at the Dunarea de Jos University of Galati (UGAL), and Nadi Bar, who is the FoodSafe project coordinator coming from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), agreed on details regarding the laboratory work associated with the tasks that UGAL has in the project and discussed on future working perspectives.

Based on the experiments performed at UGAL (Romania) and NOFIMA (Norway), it was established that cells of the strain LmR015 are barotolerant in may 2017. SafeFood consortium agreed to work with this strain to discover the mechanism that listeria cells use to recover from the high pressure stress.

UEFISCDI signed the contract that financially supports UGAL to participate in the ERA IB2 project SafeFood in april 2017.