Agri-food
Successful solutions
- Contributed to decreased antimicrobial resistance through the addition of microencapsulated bacteriophages, probiotic bacteria, and/or essential oils to animal feed to reduce counts of pathogens such as Salmonella and Clostridium in swine and chicken.
- Discovered a pathogenicity gene cluster linked to necrotic enteritis in poultry, which could lead to the development of a vaccine to protect birds.
- Developed a process to detoxify vomitoxin contaminated animal feed using natural beneficial bacterial strains and enzymes.
- Demonstrated that high pressure processing is a viable method to improve microbial safety of sodium reduced meat products.
- Provided critical scientific evidence to demonstrate the health benefit of oat dietary fibers, which was instrumental in regulatory agencies accepting the claim that “Oat fibre helps to reduce cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease.”
- Provided scientific evidence to the soy industry and regulators in the approval of a soy health claim relating regular intake of soy foods to lowering of cholesterol.
- Helped to demonstrate the health-enhancing value of purple wheat products as a source of natural antioxidants. Purple wheat is now commercially produced as Anthograin™.
- Developed a flax dehulling technology, now used commercially, to create new health and beauty products for global markets.
- Validated food manufacturing processes to enhance microbial safety in Ready-To-Eat meats.
- Developed hairless canary seed as a novel food, which has been granted regulatory approval from Health Canada and the US Food and Drug Administration.
- Developed low glycemic index potato and pulse-based breads to benefit consumers with celiac disease and chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity.
- Developed extrusion technology to make starch and protein-based bioplastic as packaging materials to extend shelf-life of foods and to reduce the environmental impact of petroleum-based plastics.
- Contributed to reducing antibiotic use and decreasing antimicrobial resistance by adding cranberry and low-bush blueberry by-products (pomaces) to broiler feed.
- Discovered a new gene in Salmonella heidelberg that confers resistance to fosfomycin, which is used in human medicine; this could lead to improved detection and mitigation strategies.
- Contributed to US Patent: (US 9,566,322 B2) describing the discovery of vaccine targets and their efficiency against Staphylococcus aureus, an important animal health and foodborne pathogen.
- Developed “green” separation technologies for extracting health-promoting functional ingredients in foods through supercritical-CO2 and subcritical-water processes.
- Developed innovative “multicore” microencapsulation technology to enhance bioactivity of bioactive-rich extracts as health-promoting food ingredients.
- Developed a microencapsulation technology for protection and target delivery of probiotic bacteria in food-producing animals by spray drying. This enables production of large quantity of dry powder probiotics in short time and at low cost.
- Initiated GRDC Phage Bank which contains characterized lytic phages targeting different foodborne pathogens such as Shigatoxin-encoding Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, and Salmonella spp.
