Dr. Fiona Crispie
Senior Technologist & Manager Teagasc Sequencing Centre
As someone with a keen interest in the role of diet and the microbiome in human health, I’m very happy to be part of this interdisciplinary and applied project looking at the impact of food bioactives and their metabolites on health and disease. The opportunity to translate results easily from “bench” to “fork” is very exciting!
Professional background
Fiona graduated with a PhD in Microbiology from University College Cork in 2002, and then worked as a post-doctoral researcher for several years, on projects involving the development of probiotic products for the prevention and therapy of bovine mastitis and on using antimicrobial peptides to increase the shelf-life of different food products, and to determine the gastric stability of those antimicrobials peptides.
In 2009, Fiona was appointed to the Teagasc sequencing Centre at TEAGASC, where she is now a Senior Technologist and the Manager of the facility. Her research relates to the study of human/animal microbiota and health including the role of diet in gut health, athlete microbiome, mother-baby, ruminants and pigs. It also incorporates the study of the microbiome of foods and the food chain, including fermented foods, fermentates, biotransformation, dairy powders and food processing environments. The facility has also contributed to research in other areas through the generation of sequencing data to support epigenetic and other studies by Irish researchers.
Selected publications
Hartikainen AK, Jalanka J, Lahtinen P, Ponsero AJ, Mertsalmi T, Finnegan L, Crispie F, Cotter PD, Arkkila P, Satokari R. 2024. Fecal microbiota transplantation influences microbiota without connection to symptom relief in irritable bowel syndrome patients. NPJ Biofilms Microbiomes. 2024 Aug 28;10(1):73. doi: 10.1038/s41522-024-00549-x.
Walsh LH, Coakley M, Walsh AM, Crispie F, O’Toole PW, Cotter PD. 2023. Analysis of the milk kefir pan-metagenome reveals four community types, core species, and associated metabolic pathways. iScience. 2023 Sep 21;26(10):108004. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108004.
Walsh LH, Walsh AM, Garcia-Perez I, Crispie F, Costabile A, Ellis R, Finlayson J, Finnegan LA, Claesson MJ, Holmes E, Cotter PD. 2023. Comparison of the relative impacts of acute consumption of an inulin-enriched diet, milk kefir or a commercial probiotic product on the human gut microbiome and metabolome. NPJ Sci Food. 2023 Aug 16;7(1):41. doi: 10.1038/s41538-023-00216-z.