Diversity and interactions in a low-input « Wheat/Human/Sourdough » agro-food ecosystem : towards a better understanding of bakery sustainability

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

BAKERY

URL

-

Start date

1/15/2014

End date

-

Budget

669,694 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Global change has a critical effect on biological and socio-cultural diversity leading to a strong demand for the development of sustainable food-agro-ecosystem. In this context, a better understanding of these diversities in the bakery food chain would facilitate development of more sustenance in this food chain. Hence, the objectives of BAKERY are to provide a detailed description of biological and socio-cultural diversity to enable a better understanding of the interactions and services in an organic or low input “Wheat/Human/Sourdough” food-agro-ecosystem. The aim is to develop a pluridisciplinary and participatory research project aiming at (i) describing socio-cultural diversity of bakers’ practices and consumers’ representations, (ii) studying the effects of wheat varieties, terroir and bakers’ practices on the diversity of sourdough microbiome, sensorial and nutritional bread quality as well as consumers preferences, (iii) analyzing the nature of the sourdough microbial interaction (complementation or selection) and their consequence on the sourdough fermentation and bread quality, (iv) integrating all the data to find determinants of the biological and socio-cultural diversity in the bakery chain, and (v) propose strategies for the conservation of biological and socio-cultural diversity in bakery. We will survey 30 French bakers and farmers/bakers who make sourdough breads, using flours resulting from agro ecological practices and distribute their production locally. Information on bakers’ practices as well as wheat seeds’ origin (for baker/farmers), flour, sourdough and bread samples will be collected. In addition we will interview thoroughly a total of thirty consumers of some of the surveyed bakers. The wheat seeds, flour and sourdough microbiome will be analyzed using metagenomic pyrosequencing and phylogeny analysis of rDNA loci. Biochemical characterization as well as sensorial analysis will be performed for sourdoughs and breads. This will delineate sourdough biodiversity, bread quality, and also the diversity of baker practices and consumer representation and implementing an integrated database. Simultaneaously taking advantage of previous works of the project partners on participative wheat breeding, we will use control experiments for analyzing the effect of terroir, of bread wheat varieties (ancient vs modern) and bakers’ practices on the sourdough microbiome and bread quality. Furthermore, we will study the sourdough microbial interaction by analyzing fermentation and population dynamic in reconstituted communities composed of lactic acid bacteria and yeast species. This approach will allow the characterization of the nature of the microbial species interaction (ecological facilitation or selection) and their consequences on the sourdoughs services (dough characteristics and bread quality). Thus, the analysis of these controlled experiments will provide candidate determinants of the diversity in “Wheat/Human/Sourdough” food-agro-ecosystem. The BAKERY project will allow us: (i) to increase our knowledge on the diversity of bakers’ and farmers/bakers’ practices and consumer representation of sourdough breads, (ii) to characterize and to conserve the microbial diversity of French sourdoughs, (iii) to better understand the impact of different determinants on the biodiversity and functioning of the “wheat/Human/Sourdough” food-agro-ecosystems, (iv) to think about the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation of wheat and microbial genetic resources and (v) to identify action promoting sustainable bread making practices. This ambitious project is based on the integration of innovative approaches and advanced tools (participatory research, pluridisciplinary interactions, mathematical modeling, post-genomic data) and will benefit from the strong complementarity between partners.