Vegetable  consumption is considered important for a healthy diet Authorities encourage the consumption of fresh plant produce, but its food safety continues to be a major concern It is an accepted fact that human pathogenic bacteria including Salmonella enterica, are able to survive in plants Chitin is the second most abundant biopolymer in nature after cellulose Soil amendment with chitin has been shown to be promising for improving soil quality, plant growth, and plant resilience A suppressive effect on human pathogens in the phyllosphere was only recently described The objective of ChitinOMix is to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind pathogen suppression in order to offer an alternative to reduce the contamination risk of fresh produce during preharvest, the most important production step to reduce the human health risk This project will focus on finding and consolidating the causal factors of the suppressive effect by using innovative and challenging OMICS approaches (eg shotgun metagenomics, dual RNA-seq combined with metabolomics) in combination with classical culture dependent microbiology and plant mutant studies Salmonella is chosen as model pathogen, given the high number of outbreaks related to fresh produce Lettuce is chosen as model for an edible crop Secondly, experiments will be performed on the plant model Arabidopsis in order to compare our results with the known fundamental knowledge regarding the plant immunity system