2. The research and technology needs that the CALIS infrastructure will be able to address

✔️ In the coming years, French research in the field of food will need to generate new knowledge (data, research results, …) at the forefront of consumer behavior sciences, food sciences (structural, nutritional, sensory, health characteristics) and translational research (impact of food on human health), taking into account toxicological risk. The evaluation of the effect of foods and diets on the health of individuals and populations through the conduct of clinical, analytical and economic studies, is a technological and organizational challenge that requires the coordination of data production capacities and their accessibility according to the principles of FAIR.

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✔️ The CALIS research infrastructure will be a tool of choice to federate actors and thus understand the health, environmental and economic impacts of a change in diets, evaluate the consequences of public food and health policies, or support companies in terms of product reformulation and innovation. It will be essential to enable progress in the field of personalized nutrition which requires closely associating research on predictive risk markers and work focused on individuals’ eating behaviors and their physiological, psychological, social and economic determinants and the adoption of a suitable diet.

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✔️ The development of new foods must be based on validated knowledge of expected health benefits, but also take into account consumer expectations in terms of sensory, cultural, environmental, usage and cost aspects. A food is not just the sum of the nutrients that compose it but a structure that plays a key role in its nutritional properties; this matrix therefore represents a lever for designing new foods that optimize digestibility and bioavailability of constituent nutrients and better meet the nutritional needs of specific populations. The transformation processes used in agri-food have significant impacts on the qualities (health, nutritional, sensory and usage) of foods and the objectives in this area will be, among others, to evaluate the benefits they bring and the risks they potentially generate, to adapt them to new raw materials, especially plant-based, to develop new efficient and eco-responsible processes… Effective research involves being able to have technological capabilities to finely characterize the structures of foods during the manufacturing process, as well as their nutritional (bioavailability, digestibility) and sensory characteristics. It is also about having technological research platforms on processes and on different raw materials.

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✔️ The mechanistic study of the links between diet and human health involves clarifying, among other things, the relationships between the food - microbiota - health tripod. Diet appears as a major lever to modulate the gut microbiota, which requires, for example, understanding the impact of food consumption, especially fermented foods, on the gut microbiota or the mechanisms of action of pre- and probiotics on the body at different stages of life1. These researches require access to digestion products (fecal matter, digestive effluents), capabilities for quantitative and functional analysis of the microbiota, access to genetic resources of consortia, capabilities in metagenomics and bioinformatics.

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✔️ Precise nutritional phenotyping of individuals (their nutritional status and their metabolic and physiological response to nutritional interventions) allows a functional view of responses to food intake and more generally to diets. Understanding the mechanisms involved in the biological response largely involves “omics” type analyses which only make sense on rigorous experimental approaches that only specialized research centers in clinical nutrition can set up.

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✔️ Thus, it is clear that the neonatal window is a key period of life during which diet can modulate the gut microbiota 9. Conversely, aging seems to be accompanied by a loss of diversity at the level of the gut microbiota that future research in nutrition will need to find out how to effectively counterbalance the conduct of clinical trials in population and in groups of healthy volunteers or patients (nutritional interventions, physical activity…), cohort follow-up, etc.

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✔️ The identification of health risk factors associated with dietary practices requires the interconnection of databases characterizing foods and consumption with clinical study databases. Research on public policies aimed at developing healthier and more sustainable eating behaviors by consumers, improving the quality of the food supply taking into account the obstacles related to social inequalities, presupposes, among other things, appreciating the economic behaviors of actors through experimental approaches.

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✔️ In France, there are collective devices in the disciplines of food science, consumer science and nutrition, but they are geographically and scientifically dispersed. These include IBISA analytical platforms, recognized process platforms (Rennes, Montpellier and, in the long term, Saclay), Human Nutrition Research Centers, the MetaGénoPolis (MGP) Pre-industrial Demonstrator, the Parisian data hub in food, observatories of food quality.

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✔️ These experimental and data devices are extremely complementary and the CALIS project aims to group them together within a single distributed research infrastructure, to improve their interaction capacities and make them more operational, both nationally and internationally. It is also about aggregating emerging assets to give them an infrastructure-type organization guaranteeing their openness and accessibility as is the case with the Saclay food hub, or the Grenoble experimental economics platform. This research infrastructure would thus provide public and private communities, from the agri-food and health sectors, with privileged access to the most advanced technologies to meet the systemic challenges of tomorrow’s food and population health, on the most advanced technology fronts combining different fields.