The world is facing the daunting challenge of increasing and improving the quality of its food production to match its population growth, and simultaneously of making its food production system more sustainable if it wants to reach the goals set in the Paris Agreement on climate change (more than a quarter of greenhouse gases are generated by the food production system). In the EU, an additional challenge comes up since about 75% of protein production is imported. This dependence on imports represents a weakness as supply chain disruptions have become much more common, due to pandemic crises or geopolitical upheavals. ARB has developed a high-quality protein ingredient, called SylPro, that addresses all these challenges. It valorises under-used feedstock (such as agricultural or forestry residues) as raw material and harnesses the power of a proprietary yeast to produce a protein rich ingredient that can be used directly for human food or animal feed. ARB’s technology can thus produce proteins both locally and on a very large scale since lignocellulosic material and agricultural side streams are available in huge quantities. Thanks to a robust and efficient process, it also has a low environmental footprint, making its product one of the protein ingredients with the lowest CO2 emissions. SYLPLANT is building on the success of its demonstration program SYLFEED, a 4-years innovative collaborative project financed by BBI-JU (2017-2021).For this project, ARB proposes to move to the next step, building its first-of-a-kind commercial plant with a capacity of 10 kt/year of SylPro and developing market applications with various partners. Upon completion, SYLPLANT will then deliver an industrial plant producing a high-quality protein ingredient, innovative market products in the food, petfood and aquafeed sectors, and a roadmap for building larger plants combining ARB and FIB’s technologies, making the vision of creating food from under-used and local resources a reality.

In ARISTO (the European Industry - Academia Network for RevIsing and Advancing the Assessment of the Soil Microbial TOxicity of Pesticides), leading universities and industrial partners join forces to perform a cutting edge research and doctorate training programme tackling the global challenge of minimising the environmental off-target effects of pesticides. The multi-sectoral approach of ARISTO, interlinking disciplines from soil microbiology, microbial ecology, environmental chemistry and risk assessment, will generate the new generation of Microbial Ecotoxicologists specialized in pesticides-soil microbes interactions. The research challenge of ARISTO is to produce benchmarking knowledge supporting the development of advanced tools and procedures, based on the response of key microbial indicator groups like ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms (AOM) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), for the comprehensive assessment of the toxicity of pesticides on soil microorganisms. ARISTO offers doctorate fellows a challenging training programme build along 5 research objectives: (1) to develop pioneering in vitro tests, as a first conservative step, to assess the toxicity of pesticides on distinct AOM (ESR1) and AMF (ESR2) strains (2) to develop advanced experimental lab and field tests to assess the toxicity of pesticides on natural soil assemblages of AOM (ESR3) and AMF (ESR4), as a more realistic toxicity assessment step (3) to develop an ecosystem-level toxicity assessment: identify the response of soil microbial networks to pesticides (ESR5) and explore the impact of pesticides on microorganisms from different trophic-levels within the soil food-web (predator - prey) (ESR6) (4) to develop novel tools and procedures to determine the soil microbial toxicity of pesticide mixtures (ESR7) and biopesticides (ESR8) (5) to develop & validate advanced in silico tools for prioritizing transformation products (TPs) of pesticides with potential toxicity to soil microbes (ESR9)