Can genomics provide the answer to safe food for all?

I rarely set the alarm as early as 4:45am, but the last Tuesday of June was a special morning. I had the honour of participating in a virtual breakfast panel discussion with a Nobel Laureate and a young scientist, in a conversation that spanned three continents at once.

The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings are an annual gathering of Nobel Prize winners and the next generation of scientists, all with the aim of fostering meaningful scientific exchange. Mars has a deep partnership with Lindau that goes back to 2006. In that time, we’ve discussed some of society’s biggest challenges—from toxins in the food supply chain to the degradation of coral reefs.

This year, together with leading crystallographer and Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath, Chief Science Officer of Nobel Media Adam Smith, and a promising young scientist from Argentina, Clara Miserendino, we discussed how genomics can help achieve global food security—that is, when all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food. To see the panel in action please watch this video.

If it’s not safe, it’s not food

Ensuring safe food for all is an urgent conversation. Climate change, water scarcity and population growth are diminishing crop, livestock and fish production, while also increasing food safety challenges such as the prevalence of pests and diseases. In short—food security is under threat.

At Mars, we believe that if it’s not safe, it’s not food. We also firmly believe that industry has a key role to play in helping achieve food security. But, no single entity can address global food safety challenges which is why we’ve been calling for collaboration for some time and why we opened the Mars Global Food Safety Center in 2015 - without safe food, nobody wins. Which is why it is vitally important that conversations like the one we had at Lindau are taking place.

The huge potential of genomics

A tool we’re exploring at Mars is genomics. Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) is the process of determining the entirety of the DNA sequence of an organism’s genome. By mapping each organism’s unique genetic blueprint and bringing these data together with sophisticated bioinformatics pipelines we are opening the door to better identification, tracking and tracing of foodborne pathogens, as well as improving the quality and resilience of crops.

The applications of WGS in food safety management, including the opportunities it provides for enhanced integration of information from other sectors, such as human and animal health, could therefore contribute to enhanced consumer protection, trade facilitation, nutrition and food security. 

 We first started exploring genomics as it relates to food safety in 2014 in a collaboration between the Mars Advanced Research Institute and IBM. Together in 2015 we created a food safety partnership and established the Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain, seeking to make progress towards achieving global food security through the application of genomics and big data.

Since the consortium began, we’ve seen several breakthroughs, including validation of the initial hypothesis that the microbiome is valuable for assessing food safety and the development of a reference database with more than 160,000 curated genomes.

In the future, we see these techniques being applied to support tracing of food origins through metagenomics and the microbiome. This has huge implications for food security and beyond.

Innovation is a team sport

As a passionate football fan, I was excited about Tuesday 29th – the day the England men’s football team took on Germany – for more than one reason! And our panel discussion at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings didn’t fail to live up to the sense of occasion and deliver an engaging encounter.

During our panel, we covered a lot of ground from the real-world applications of genomics, to transparency in sharing data, and women in science. However, a clear theme stood out for me— uncommon collaboration. As Ada Yonath rightly made clear, we need to break down silos in science to address some of the most difficult challenges we face. For food security, that means all sectors and disciplines coming together, collaborating and sharing to leverage the full potential of genomics in the future, for generations to come.

That’s the power of Lindau – the meeting of leading scientific minds across generations. And that’s a goal worth celebrating.