The UC Davis Microbiome Special Research Program and the Office of Research are pleased to announce the recipients of seven seed funding awards. Each awarded proposal will receive $40,000 over two years. The seed funding program is designed to catalyze new projects and innovations in microbiome sciences with an emphasis on new interdisciplinary collaborations within UC Davis.

There’s an old saying that “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.” But that may no longer be the case thanks to new materials being developed by UC Davis researchers to line produce bins and for reusable packaging. UC Davis food scientist Nitin Nitin with samples of antifouling, antibacterial plastic. The material could be used for packaging and for lining produce bins. The goal is to produce plastics that both repel bacteria and reduce food-spoilage microbes. The antimicrobial activity comes from chlorine bound to the plastic. It would be recharged by rinsing with a bleach solution. The bacteria-repelling, or antifouling property comes from the plastic itself. It feels slippery, so if bacteria cannot stick to a surface, they cannot grow and form a contaminating film.

UC Davis Biomedical Engineering’s Dr. Jamal Lewis isn’t just researching dangerous shellfish allergies: He lives with them every day. So it’s especially meaningful that his lab has been awarded a two-year, $150,000 grant to research solutions that would help himself and the approximately 1.4 percent of Americans — about 4 million people — who share his health condition. The National Institute of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant will enable the Lewis Lab – which specializes in using biomaterials to control the immune system – to research using materials derived from gut-resident bacteria to avoid unwanted allergic responses.

Professor Bruce German of the UC Davis Food Science & Technology department has spent the past two decades studying lactation and its role in evolution. Among the findings of a group of scientists from across the campus: human milk contains a large proportion of oligosaccharides — short chains of sugar molecules — that babies can’t digest, so they “run right through them.” (If you have a certain kind of diaper-changing experience, you know what this looks like.) The question was, why? German joined with Professor Carlito Lebrilla from the UC Davis chemistry department and School of Medicine to analyze these amazingly complex oligosaccharides. German suspected that these oligosaccharides existed to nourish bacteria, not the baby. He turned to colleague Professor David Mills, a UC Davis molecular biologist, to find out which bacteria could digest these human milk oligosaccharides.