Functional Plant Compounds Working Group

The main research efforts for this working group range from studying the biodiversity and use of secondary metabolite–producing plants (medicinal and aromatic plants) to assessing the importance and application of functional plant compounds in medicine and nutrition. Further areas of expertise besides the use of functional plant compounds is on the antinutritive and toxic properties of plant secondary compounds and their identification in animals.

Animal Nutrition Working Group

This working group focuses its research efforts on clinical nutrition in small animals and on practical questions concerning feeding strategies, also on feed hygiene, particularly as it concerns the quality of food products of animal origin with regard to naturally occurring contaminants.

Naturally, cooperation within the department in the areas of public health and food science is a given, but cooperation also extends across the University to various clinical, etiological and paraclinical institutions and beyond the campus borders to include numerous international projects. These joint efforts are essential for working on the increasingly complex challenges confronting researchers doing basic research in the field of pathophysiology and also serve to vouchsafe food quality using modern, vertically integrated approaches. Quality assurance of feed goes hand in hand with quality assurance of food.