First Annual WFSC Symposium a Success
The first annual World Food System Center Symposium took place on Friday evening, 4. November. The 200 attendees and participants heard 6 presentations and viewed nearly 50 posters featuring food systems research being conducted at ETH Zurich.
Concluding Projects
The presentations featured conclusions from the first six PhD and Postdoctoral projects funded by the WFS Grants platform. This competitive grants platform is administered by the Center in coordination with the Research Commission of the ETH Zurich, and awards approximately 1.4 million CHF per year through two programs. The Sustainability in Food Value Chains program (supported by the Coop Research Program) and the Organic Production Systems for Food Security program (supported by the Mercator Research Program).
The presentations highlighted these six concluding projects:
- Greenhouse gas emissions of dairy production systems based on longevity and zero-concentrate strategy as compared to conventional systems (LLC)
- Managing trade-offs in coffee agroforests (MOCA)
- Zinc biofortification of wheat through organic matter management in sustainable agriculture (ZOMM)
- Improving buckwheat as an agronomically attractive crop for healthy food (IMPROBUCK)
- Cadmium availability in soils and its uptake by cocoa in Latin America (CdOCOA)
- Novel approach to biologically control spoilage of fresh vegetables using naturally produced reuterin (BioControl)
Images from the Symposium
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Best Poster Award
Symposium attendees had the opportunity to vote for the Best Poster Award. With a tie for first place, the award will be shared by two PhD students: Julian Helfenstein, from the group of Plant Nutrition (Prof. Emmanuel Frossard) and Jianbo Zhang, from the
Laboratory of Toxicology (Prof. Shana Sturla).
The posters are:
Organic Wheat Farming Improves Grain Zinc Concentration in central India*
Julian Helfenstein, Isabel Müller, Roman Grüter, Gurbir Bhullar, Lokendra Mandloi, Andreas Papritz, Michael Siegrist, Rainer Schulin, Emmanuel Frossard
*This work is connected to the WFSC-supported ZOMM project, which was also presented in a talk at the symposium.
Gut microbes transform food mutagens to metabolites with changed toxicity
Jianbo Zhang, Shana J. Sturla, Mirjam Schneider, Mostafa Fekry, Christina Engels, Christophe Lacroix
Further information
The symposium's detailed program, additional information about the event, and a selection of the posters can be viewed on the event webpage.