Aya Fakih (Thesis started on october 2022)

The PhD thesis, undertaken within the framework of the European project H2020-SAFFI "Safe Food For infant in the EU and China", aims to assess the interest of the volatile metabolome (volatolome) to study the influence of the microbial ecosystem of a food on the development of pathogens at critical stages of a manufacturing chain of an infant food. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with several international partners of the SAFFI project and in particular the UNITO of Turin (Italy) with whom inter-laboratory exchanges of PhD students are already planned.

The thesis project will be structured around two phases aiming respectively at (i) comparing the performances of the different options of analysis of the microbial volatolome of the food; (ii) characterizing, using the most performing option, the conditions of microbial environment (microbiota of the food, microbiota surrounding the production chain) which are likely to promote or inhibit the development of pathogens in infant foods. Combined with other multiomic data on the structure and function of the ecosystems surrounding pathogens, the new phenotypic information provided by the volatolome should enable a better prediction of the behavior of pathogens in the product and thus, a more reliable assessment of microbiological risks.

Supervisors: Erwan Engel (thesis director) and Jérémy Ratel.