Partner 27 University of Bologna (UNIBO)
The University of Bologna (UNIBO), created in 1088, is recognized as the oldest university in the western world, and one of the largest in Italy (with more than 85,000 enrolled students per year). It is organized in a multi-campus structure divided into 33 departments and 5 operating sites (Bologna, Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna and Rimini). At European level, UNIBO is the first University in Italy for FP7 funding with more than 260 funded projects (in 56 as coordinator), for a total funding nearly of 84 M€. At National level UNIBO ranks second for competitive research funding from the Italian Government. The UNIBO research group (Food Safety Unit) participating in COMPARE belongs to the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL) and the group of Biostatistics is located within the Physics Department and is a part of the Luigi Galvani Inter-Departmental center for Biophysics, Bioinformatics and Biocomplexity the Physics Department (CIG). DISTAL includes 6 principal scientific areas related to food safety, human nutrition, food chemistry, food microbiology, food production and technology, food quality. The Food Safety Unit is involved in different national/international projects mainly focused on: 1) monitoring of prevalence, counts and genotypes of traditional, emerging and re-emerging foodborne pathogens in order to trace contamination sources of foodborne bacteria in the farm to fork chain; 2) harmonization and validation of new, fast and reliable molecular methods for detection and quantification of bacterial pathogens in food; 3) improvement of predictive models on risk analysis by fit-for purpose sampling plans, 4) proposal of Food Safety Criteria [Performance Objectives (POs) and Food Safety Objectives (FSOs)] in different animal food chain (egg, meat and milk) in order to reduce the human risk 5) molecular characterization of antimicrobial resistance genes in foodborne bacterial pathogens; 6) investigation of different strategies to reduce the colonization of bacterial zoonotic pathogens in chicken gut by using metagenomic approach. The Food Safety Unit At present is is the coordinator of the FP7 large scale integrating project BASELINE and is workpackage leader of the FP7 project named STARTEC and participated in other FP5 and FP6 projects of relevance to COMPARE named, CAMPYCHECK and POULTRYFLORGUT as WP Leader.
Principle Investigator: Gerardo Manfreda,
gerardo.manfreda@unibo.it