In the era of increased environmental and health awareness new ways are being explored how to fully exploit to this day unrivalled natural resources with renewable bio-production. These new production methods will generate a sustainable pipeline of environmentally-friendly methods to enable production of pharma and agrochemical products with bioactive properties from berry fruits.

This project stands out in bringing together the most recent technologies within the framework of systems metabolic engineering to develop the next-generation bacterial cell factories for the production of plant phenolics, and in applying it to phenolic compounds from cultivated, wild and underutilized species of berries – recognized for their antioxidant, health-promoting and functional properties and applied across applications as diverse as aromas, colours, nutraceuticals and medicines.

BacHBERRY (From BACterial Hosts for production of Bioactive phenolics from bERRY fruits to products) sets out over a three year periode to develop a portfolio of sustainable methodologies to mine the potential of the untapped biodiversity of the bioactive phenolic compounds in an extensive collection of berry species. Full exploitation of this unrivalled natural resource requires an integrated and comprehensive effort from bioprospecting in berries using SMART high-throughput screens for the valorisation of phenolic bioactivities aligned with their identification using cutting edge analytics and subsequent elucidation of their biosynthetic pathways. This knowledge will facilitate metabolic engineering of suitable bacterial hosts for high-value phenolics production in scalable fermentation bioprocesses, ultimately serving as commercial production platforms.