Paul Cotter

Paul Cotter, Teagasc Food Research Centre, IR 

Prof Paul Cotter is the Head of Food Biosciences at Teagasc, is a Principal Investigator with the large Irish Research Centres, APC Microbiome Ireland, VistaMilk and Food for Health Ireland and CTO/co-founder of SeqBiome, a microbiome sequencing and bioinformatics service provider. He is a molecular microbiologist, with a particular focus on the microbiology of foods (especially fermented foods), the food chain and of humans, as well as probiotics and postbiotics. Prof Cotter is the author of >350 peer-reviewed, was included in the Clarivate list of highly cited researchers for 2018-2023 and is the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Microbiology.

Insights from combined metabolome and microbiome analysis of fermented beverages

Molecular technologies including high-throughput sequencing have expanded our perception of the microbial world. Unprecedented insights into the composition and function of microbial communities has generated great interest, with numerous landmark studies published in recent years relating the important roles of microbiomes and the environment - especially diet and nutrition - in human, animal, and global health. As such, food microbiomes represent an important crossover between the environment and host. This is especially true of fermented food microbiomes, which actively introduce microbial metabolites and to a lesser extent, live microbes into the human gut. Here we use the examples of the fermented beverages, milk kefir and water kefir, to show how molecular approaches have advanced our understanding of the microbiome and metabolome, including volatilome, of these beverages over the past decade. We highlight how various molecular approaches have helped us to understand the ways in which microbes shape the qualities, and in particular flavour, of these products, and how this knowledge can be harnessed to further optimise these products.