News
18th December 2015
Ugandan mushroom project brings hope to orphans in Africa
Uganda is one of the poorest countries in the world, making life for its most vulnerable inhabitants even tougher. But one orphanage caring for abandoned children has been giving fresh hope as part of a larger project aimed to help Ugandans improve their livelihoods,...
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7th December 2015
Study points to how gut bacteria evolved host specificity
The microbiota, the complex microbial community that we host in our gut, influences a number of different processes in our bodies, including metabolism and immunity. A change in the composition of the gut microbiota has been associated with a number of diseases. As we...
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5th November 2015
Tying up the ends of Tanzania’s meat supply chain
Dr Gary Barker is a partner in Livestock, Livelihoods and Health, a collaborative research programme focused on livestock diseases, and how they affect the people of Tanzania. Livestock management is vital to many in Tanzania, but is facing challenges such as urbanisation, climate change...
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28th October 2015
A new study from the Institute of Food Research could help us trace sources of microbial infections more quickly. It uses a computer program to analyse large amounts of genome sequence data, without the need for large, powerful computer equipment, making this sort of...
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28th October 2015
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IACR)’s announcement that processed meat is a cause of cancer, and that red meat is a probable cause of cancer, needs to be taken in the context of what these classifications mean. Crucially, these classifications don’t indicate...
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22nd October 2015
Sunday’s BBC Countryfile programme on October 25 includes a feature on a variety of broccoli bred to contain higher levels of a compound called glucoraphanin. This broccoli, called Beneforté, is now being grown commercially in the UK and around the world and is available...
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16th October 2015
Would you like food poisoning with that?
It’s not a side order most of us would choose, yet over a million people in the UK suffer from some form of food poisoning each year. Arnoud van Vliet from IFR’s Food Safety Centre, gave the latest IFR Public Lecture last month. His...
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12th October 2015
Yeast treasure-trove goes live
A new project is sequencing the genomes of a collection of yeast strains, to help unlock the great biodiversity within yeasts to produce biofuels and other chemicals more sustainably. The UK National Collection of Yeast Cultures (NCYC) is a world-leading biological resource, maintaining and...
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23rd September 2015
New EU project to reduce food waste begins
The Institute of Food Research (IFR) is a key partner in the new EU funded multinational research project that will help reduce food waste by 30% by 2025. Resource Efficient Food and dRink for the Entire Supply cHain (REFRESH) is an EU Horizon 2020...
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5th August 2015
IFR Success at the UK National Institutes of Bioscience 2015 conference
Aline Metris and colleagues at the Institute of Food Research and The Genome Analysis Centre recently won second prize in the National Institutes of Bioscience (NIB) Conference poster session. Their poster described SalmoNet – a genome wide network of interactions between proteins in Salmonella...
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