Health diets require diversification of nutrients, supporting and promoting the traditional food products while keep finding new ways to their safeguard. Figs are nutritious and delicious products endowed with many health-benefiting nutrients. Drying contributes to widen their availability, diversify trade, and promote their nutritive value. Recent research trends show that oligosaccharides (OS) and soluble polysaccharides non-digestible by human gut enzymes are of great interest for their health benefits and natural nutraceutical value. Although dried figs nutritional quality has been well studied, there is a lack of knowledge on the matching of the OS and soluble dietary fiber (SDF) structural features and their potential health dietary benefits. PrOSFig project aims at valorizing dried figs OS as prebiotics and polysaccharides as SDF. As an MSCA fellow, I propose to study at UAveiro the (i) drying processing, consumer perception and conservation of figs (ii) extraction and chemical characterization of dried figs OS and SDF. This will allow to perform a secondment at UPorto to (iii) monitor the bioavailability and bioaccessibility of the OS and SDF and their interactions with fig polyphenols, and a second secondment at UMinho to (iv) carry out in vitro assessment of prebiotic properties. This interdisciplinary approach in a relevant food research topic, draws a unique skill set and state-of-the-art in four different but complementary fields: (1) drying technology for producing healthy foods, (2) consumer acceptability of traditional dried fruits (3) food biochemistry via the application of spectroscopic techniques as tools for OS and SDF characterization, and (4) bio-engineering for evaluating the physiological aspects of OS and SDF related with gut microbiota. The integration in these Universities dissemination and communication programs, as well as in their training activities, will support me to develop my career.

The last decades witnessed a quest for devices responding to temperature at a distance with unprecedented space resolution, approaching the nanoscale. Such devices are valuable in both fundamental and applied science, from overheat in micromachines to hyperthermia applied to cells. Despite great advances, the response is still collected in 2D. In real systems, heat flows in 3 dimensions such that 2D nanothermometers give just a plane view of a 3D reality. The restriction to 2D emerges because space resolution is bound to time and temperature resolutions, leading to a trilemma: scanning into the 3rd dimension is time consuming and cannot be achieve without losing temperature and time resolutions. While incremental improvements have been achieved in recent years, adding the 3rd dimension to nanothermometry is crucial for further impact and requires an innovative approach. Herein, I propose the development of nano local probes with tailored magnetic properties recording critical information about local temperature in 3D. These thermometric local probes avoid the resolution trilemma by recording the most relevant temperature information instead of reading the present temperature value. In many applications, including cellular hyperthermia, most part of the current temperature reading is of minor relevance and can be dropped. The key temperature information includes the maximum temperature achieved, the surpass of a given temperature threshold, and the time elapsed after this surpass. Once recorded, this key information can be read in 3D by standard devices (such as confocal microscopes and magnetic resonance imaging scanners) without time constrains and thus keeping a high space and temperature resolution. Moreover, the reading step can be performed in-situ and/or ex-situ, decoupling probes and reading devices if needed. This widens the range of applications of nanothermometers, allowing detection in confined environments and in non-transparent media.

The aim of ‘AMNIOGEL’ is the development of human extracellular matrix (ECM) based materials, as radically innovative, highly versatile human-derived platforms for 3D cell culture, microtissue development and disease models establishment. In particular, we will develop 3D disease models that could be used as an enabling tool for personalized drug discovery, increasing our understanding of the mechanisms behind bone cancer. The proposed cutting-edge technology enables the culture of human cells in a physiologically relevant microenvironment for applications in cell culture research, drug screening and development, cancer research, tissue engineering, replacement of animal testing and therapeutic applications. The potential of this technology to reduce or completely replace use of animals for biological screenings is expected to have a significant impact in the 3D cell culture market and pharmaceutical industry by accelerating drug screening and development reducing associated costs. The innovation potential of our products is based on the fact that contain human biochemical cues (vital for cell function), is a complete xeno-free solution (avoids contamination) for human cell culture and easy to manipulate. It is worth mentioning that offers the possibility to be personalised (using the patient’s own ECM) according to the customer needs. Moreover, our culture substrates are easily processed in multiple geometries and in microarrays amenable to ‘organ-on- a-chip’ systems designed for high-throughput screening (HTS) applications.

This project addresses the quest of new materials and approaches that nanotechnology requires to solve the current limitations of medicine. The potential to externally track and image organs and the potential presence and evolution of diseases by using light becomes a reality thanks to the use of especially tailored biocompatible nanoplatforms. New avenues to image living bodies by light allied with mechanical waves (i.e. sound) are going to be opened. We propose here an elegant marriage between light and sound endowing smartly designed nanoprobes with the capability of deep-tissue photoacoustic imaging, also accompanied by all-optical temperature sub-tissue measuring. To increase the penetration depth and spatial resolution, an imaging approach pumping the probes with near-infrared light is proposed. Therefore, we propose a kind of material no previously exploited for photoacoustic exogenous agent, working as bimodal nanoprobe by also optically measuring temperature within the biological transparency windows in the near-infrared

Rationale: Photosynthesis is almost exclusively restricted to algae and plants, with the exception of some protozoans, flatworms and marine slugs that acquire chloroplasts from algae. In metazoans, the capacity to incorporate functional chloroplasts (kleptoplasty) for long periods of time has only been described in sacoglossan sea slugs. Some species retain kleptoplasts photosynthetically active for several months that persist without access to algal gene products and despite the release of potentially dangerous metabolites, including reactive oxygen species (ROS). While kleptoplasty is intriguing from an evolutionary perspective, there are many unresolved questions on how the algal organelle is incorporated into the metabolism of an animal cell and what the host-associated benefits are. Aim: This proposal will unravel the cellular mechanisms supporting the sequestration and maintenance of functional chloroplasts inside metazoan cells and determine the host benefits of harboring kleptoplasts. Approach: The expertise in keeping a variety of species will form the backbone of my state-of-the-art experimental strategy, comparing a wide range of different animal-alga associations in their response to chloroplast incorporation and variable ability to functionally maintain them. Lipidomic and transcriptomic analyses will unravel in a comparative approach the species-specific maintenance strategies underlying kleptoplasty. In addition, the impact of cytotoxic compounds produced by active kleptoplasts and in particular ROS production and scavenging will be explore. Finally, I will determine the fate of inorganic carbon and nitrogen to explore the contribution of photosynthesis-derived compounds to the physiology of the host. Impact: This analysis will resolve some of the long-standing questions regarding the maintenance of photosynthetically active chloroplasts in animal cells and produce crucial insights about long-term kleptoplasty in sacoglossan sea slugs.