Chairs: Giorgia Del Favero & Thomas Hartung
The constantly increasing world population parallels rising demand for safe food commodities. To ensure food quality, animal-centric hazard characterization struggles to keep the pace and research on efficient, animal-free, screening methods is imperative. This pressure, together with the challenges related to the climate crisis, is quickly turning NAMs into a paramount priority also in food toxicology. Indeed, on the one hand naturally occurring contaminants are rapidly affected by environmental constraints such as shortage of water, nutrient availability, temperature fluctuations and cross contamination with alien species. Additionally, anthropogenic activities expand the occurrence of human-made chemicals and the likelihood of mixture toxicity. Computational and cell-based approaches promise to support disentangling this complexity toward hazard prioritization and the rapid identification of molecular mechanisms of toxicity of foodborne contaminants. Due to the chemical heterogeneity of dietary-occurring xenobiotics and the complex interactions between gastrointestinal compartments (i.e. membrane barriers, mucus layer and gut microbiota), the digestive tract is still poorly represented in NAMs. This session will thus focus on recent advances in data processing and development of gut-competent in vitro and in silico methods of applicability in food toxicology. Leveraging on high-performance computing we will zoom in the molecular interactions between food constituents, contaminants and receptors expressed by intestinal cells. Further, we will present recent advances in quantitatively predicting the health impact of gut microbial biotransformation of xenobiotics by combined in vitro and in silico approaches. We will then explore the performance of intestinal differentiated cell co-cultures integrated with tailored-shaped nanoparticles synthesized to mimic the gut luminal environment and probe the integrity of the cell junctions at the nanoscale. To conclude, a holistic perspective will be given on the potential groundbreaking applications of AI-based tools to enrich and speed up data analysis and decision-making in the context of food safety.
Speakers
- Giorgia Del Favero – DEVELOPING TOOLS TO ASSESS THE INTESTINAL BARRIER INTEGRITY AT THE NANOSCALE
- Luca Dellafiora – Computational Toxicology Unveils Receptor-Mediated Effects of Food Toxins at the Gut Level: A Structural Perspective for Food Safety Assessment
- Georg Aichinger – Advances in microbiome-competent PBK modeling to quantitatively predict the toxicity of gut microbial biotransformation products.
- Thomas Hartung – AI-Driven Advances in Gut-Competent NAMs for Food Safety Assessment
- Laure-Alix Clerbaux – AOP-aligned NAMs to link gut microbial events to liver outcome: case study on food nanomaterials.