Welcome
The Lu's Food Safety & Health Engineering Lab at McGill works on genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics along with nanotechnology to investigate critical scientific questions in food science. We have interest in developing innovative and rapid sensing, instrumentation systems and detection methods for ensuring food safety as well as preventing food bioterrorism and fraud. We also apply molecular biology and genomic approaches to investigate stress response and pathogenesis of microorganisms that post threats to agri-food system and public health. Recently, we have started 1) food synthetic biology and cellular agriculture that allow for the production of food with higher and tailored nutritional value, food with longer shelf life and devoid of harmful ingredients (e.g. allergens) and 2) investigation of the interaction between food components and gut microbiota.
We focus on both mechanism elucidation and knowledge translation to tackle research challenges in food safety and food industry.
Our current research is focused on six major directions:
(1) Developing sensor, spectroscopy and single-molecule photonics coupled with various separation techniques to rapidly detect chemical and microbiological hazards in food systems
(2) Campylobacter-associated food safety
(3) Food microbiology, including detection and molecular characterization of foodborne pathogens, evaluation of intervention technologies to reduce pathogens in food systems, investigation of the evolution of bacterial antibiotic resistance, assessment of bacterial biofilms, and study of bacterial response due to environmental stresses
(4) Interaction between food components/diet pattern and human gut, such as gut microbiome and gut diseases (e.g., inflammatory bowel disease, gut wounds, and colorectal cancer)
(5) Food synthetic biology and cellular agriculture
(6) Intelligent food safety: application of artificial intelligence (e.g., deep machine learning), big data, and internet of things to improve the safety of our future food chain