27 May 2024
Events: my take-home message
Teagasc’s researchers attend many events throughout the year, sharing the findings from their research with national and international audiences. Here, we capture the take-home messages – key pieces of information that our researchers want people to remember – from recent events.
Eoin O’Connor and Joy Clarke at ISMS (Photo: Teagasc)
Highly anticipated meeting of mushroom minds
Event: 20th International Society of Mushroom Science (ISMS) Congress and 26th North American Mushroom Conference, Nevada, USA.
Date: 26 to 29 February 2024
The ISMS congress is only held every four years, making it a much-anticipated feature on the mushroom research calendar. Several of Teagasc’s mushroom researchers have been working towards presenting at this event.
Joy Clarke, a Teagasc Walsh Scholar in the Horticulture Development Department, travelled with Teagasc’s mushroom research group to attend.
“I was delighted and inspired to see that one of the keynote speakers to share their exciting research in mushroom science was a former Teagasc Walsh Scholar Gold Medal Winner, Eoin O’Connor,” said Joy.
After finishing his PhD in 2019, Eoin continued working with mushrooms and took up a post-doc position at Penn State University.
“Eoin gave an excellent talk on his research profiling the composition, function and development of the mushroom casing microbiome or ‘devome’, which was very interesting to me as I am doing some casing microbiome work in my project,” Joy said of Eoin’s work. “It was great to have the opportunity to catch up with Eoin in person and learn all about his professional journey since leaving Teagasc and share with him the progress of my project. He gave me great advice for the final year of my PhD, and I hope I will be able to carry on in Eoin’s footsteps and contribute important research to the mushroom industry.”
Don’t miss out on Teagasc’s upcoming events! Join us at Ashtown on 20 June for Counting Carbon and on 16 July at Johnstown Castle for Farming for a Better Future 2024. Visit teagasc.ie for more info.
Gut instinct – digestion dialogues
Event: 8th International Conference on Food Digestion, Porto, Portugal
Date: 9 to 11 April 2024
The INFOGEST network organised the 8th edition of the bi-annual International Conference on Food Digestion. After a successful conference in 2022 in Cork organised by Teagasc, Porto hosted this year’s event with 410 participants from over 30 countries.
The conference presentations covered all stages of digestion from oral processing, gastric re-structuring and the latest developments in 3D imaging, intestinal nutrient absorption, nutritional balance of novel foods, advances in in vitro, in vivo and in silico methods to the role of the microbiome on food digestion. An overarching trend has been the shift towards non-animal proteins. Their use for food applications is still limited but a worldwide effort is underway to improve their digestive behaviour and nutritional properties.
Teagasc Moorepark made a significant contribution with 17 posters, 14 of these were with international collaborators, and three oral presentations. Teagasc’s André Brodkorb, Linda Giblin and Daniela Freitas led international working group meetings covering the themes: In Vitro Models of Digestion, Absorption Models and Digestive Amylases and Starch Digestion, attracting 250 participants.
Siyi Feng, a Teagasc Walsh scholar (on EU project Giant Leaps) received a Best Poster award for her work on the ‘Digestibility of Protein from Microalgae (Honey Chlorella Vulgaris)’. The 2023 Walsh Scholar of the Year Davor Daniloski (Teagasc & Victoria University Melbourne) was also shortlisted for the Early Career Award.
INFOGEST is an international scientific network sharing information on food digestion. It started as an EU-funded COST action in 2011. It now has over 800 active researchers from 200 institutions, in both academia and industry, across 52 countries, with active communication via LinkedIn and YouTube, administered by André Brodkorb and a strong group of early-stage Teagasc Moorepark researchers and post-docs.
Siyi Feng with their award-winning poster
[Pic credit] Teagasc
Further reading
One minute with Joy Clarke – Biological control of mushroom disease