Mélanie Grégoire wins Best Poster Prize at the BACELL 2025 meeting in Amsterdam

Mélanie Grégoire, bioengineer in chemistry and bio-industries, is enrolled in a joint PhD programme at UNamur and ULiège since February 2022. Her doctoral research is co-supervised by Prof. Francesco Renzi (UNamur, NARILIS, URBM) and Prof. Frank Delvigne (ULiège, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tec, MiPI lab) and is carried out in the framework of the FoodWal-PEPTIBoost project, funded by the Walloon Region (Win4Excellence). The ambition of the PEPTIBoost project is to produce and characterize original bioactive peptides to boost the nutritional and functional quality of foodstuffs. Bioactive peptides are short protein sequences which, in addition to their nutritional value, also have health-promoting effects such as hypotensive, immunomodulator, antioxidant properties.

In this context, Mélanie Grégoire focuses on Bacillus subtilis, a well-established model organism known for its ability to efficiently secrete proteins. Although it is widely used as a microbial cell factory for industrial protein production, cell-to-cell heterogeneity remains a major challenge. Mélanie’s work aims to identify the sources of this variability and to develop a biosensor that can monitor protein secretion in real-time at the single-cell level. This innovative tool is expected to enhance the robustness and efficiency of industrial bioproduction processes.

On June 17-18, 2025, Mélanie had the opportunity to present her work at BACELL 2025 in Amsterdam, a European network that brings together academic and industrial experts working on Bacillus subtilis and related species. Her poster presentation, entitled "Development of a fluorescent biosensor for monitoring protein secretion at a single-cell level”, received a Best Poster Prize! Congratulations to Mélanie on this well-deserved recognition of her promising research!