admission. This proportion could already be greater in some parts of the country and may increase if referrals of cases of self-poisoning increase faster than the facilities for their assessment and management. The provision of social work and psychiatric expertise in casualty departments may be one means of preventing unnecessary medical admissions without risk to the patients. Dr Blake's and Dr Bramble's figures do not demonstrate, however, that any advantage would attach to medical teams taking over assessment from psychiatrists except that, by implication, assessments would be completed sooner by staff working on the ward full time. What the figures actually suggest is that if assessment of overdoses were left to house doctors there would be an increase in admissions to psychiatric units (by 19°U), outpatients (by 5O°'), and referrals to social services (by 140o). So for house doctors to assess overdoses would provide no economy for the psychiatric or social services. The study does not tell us what the consequences would have been for the six patients who the psychiatrists would have admitted but to whom the house doctors would have offered outpatient appointments. E J SALTER

Vitamin D deficiency.

‡We describe the use of singular value decomposition in transforming genome-wide expression data from genes 3 arrays space to reduced diagonalized ‘‘eigengenes’’ 3 ‘‘eigenarrays’’ space, where the eigengenes (or eigenarrays) are unique orthonormal superpositions of the genes (or arrays). Normalizing the data by filtering out the eigengenes (and eigenarrays) that are inferred to represent noise or experimental artifacts enables meaningful comparison of the expression of different genes across different arrays in different experiments. Sorting the data according to the eigengenes and eigenarrays gives a global picture of the dynamics of gene expression, in which individual genes and arrays appear to be classified into groups of similar regulation and function, or similar cellular state and biological phenotype, respectively. After normalization and sorting, the significant eigengenes and eigenarrays can be associated with observed genome-wide effects of regulators, or with measured samples, in which these regulators are overactive or underactive, respectively.

Singular Value Decomposition for Genome-Wide Expression Data Processing and Modeling

Complex biological systems and cellular networks may underlie most genotype to phenotype relationships. Here, we review basic concepts in network biology, discussing different types of interactome networks and the insights that can come from analyzing them. We elaborate on why interactome networks are important to consider in biology, how they can be mapped and integrated with each other, what global properties are starting to emerge from interactome network models, and how these properties may relate to human disease.

Interactome networks and human disease

Global food production must increase by 50% to meet the projected demand of the world’s population by 2050. Meeting this difficult challenge will be made even harder if climate change melts portions of the Himalayan glaciers to affect 25% of world cereal production in Asia by influencing water availability. Pest and disease management has played its role in doubling food production in the last 40 years, but pathogens still claim 10–16% of the global harvest. We consider the effect of climate change on the many complex biological interactions affecting pests and pathogen impacts and how they might be manipulated to mitigate these effects. Integrated solutions and international co-ordination in their implementation are considered essential. Providing a background on key constraints to food security, this overview uses fusarium head blight as a case study to illustrate key influences of climate change on production and quality of wheat, outlines key links between plant diseases, climate change and food security, and highlights key disease management issues to be addressed in improving food security in a changing climate.

/pdf/climate-change-plant-diseases-and-food-security-an-overview-3bhf3j81bn.pdf

Climate change, plant diseases and food security: an overview

Nonthermal plasma (NTP) is electrically energized matter and is composed of highly reactive species including gas molecules, charged particles in the form of positive ions, negative ions, free radicals, electrons and quanta of electromagnetic radiation (photons) at near-room temperature. NTP technology is an emerging nonthermal technology with potential applications for sterilization in the food industries. An upsurge in the research activities for plasma-based inactivation of food-borne pathogens is evident in recent years. These studies have shown that NTP can be used for the surface decontamination of raw produce including; dried nuts and packaging materials. This paper reviews the action of plasma agents on the microbial classes and describes proven and potential applications in food processing. Novel developments in the technology and a future outlook for the application to foods are discussed.

/pdf/nonthermal-plasma-inactivation-of-food-borne-pathogens-42he42en6a.pdf

Nonthermal Plasma Inactivation of Food-Borne Pathogens

Future challenges to microbial food safety.

Effect of growth rate and selection pressure on rates of transfer of an antibiotic resistance plasmid between E. coli strains.

This report consists of a review of the available scientific evidence on the state of art of omics technologies with a particular focus on applications in the area of food and feed safety. The report gives a description of the different types of omics technologies with respect to recent progresses made on the application of these techniques in chemical and microbiological risk assessment. Hereto, case studies were selected in order to cover different areas under the remit of EFSA. In this review each case study has been investigated with respect to its hazard, experimental methodologies, (statistical) data analysis and its link to food/feed safety risk assessment. Finally, the added value of omics technologies as compared to classical risk assessment and current limitations of omics technologies for their application in chemical and microbiological food safety risk assessment has been discussed. This investigation shows that most of the studies on chemical agents focus on mode of action identification and a search for biomarkers using transcriptomics. As for microbial food safety, omics have not yet been successfully applied often. When applied, they never target the host, but focus on aspects of the pathogen, e.g. in detection or source attribution. © National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Institute of Food Research (IFR), Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek, part of Wageningen University and Research Center (DLO), University of Amsterdam (UvA), 2013

https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2903/sp.efsa.2013.EN-495

A foresight study on emerging technologies: State of the art of Omics technologies and potential applications in food and feed safety

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11538-012-9731-3.pdf

Modeling Non-inherited Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance in human pathogens is becoming a major threat to human health. This is partly due to agriculture, because large amounts of antibiotics are used to treat animals, which encourages resistant genes to appear and transfer to humans through foodstuffs. This is a food safety issue. Measures against selection of resistance in agriculture have long been limited to monitoring. The scientific knowledge acquired in recent years can be used to introduce cost-effective measures, such as harmonized monitoring and prudent usage, which should be enforced by the competent national authorities. Some antibiotics should be reserved for human use only and this should be reviewed regularly.

B.H. ter Kuile

Papers

Future challenges to microbial food safety.

Effect of growth rate and selection pressure on rates of transfer of an antibiotic resistance plasmid between E. coli strains.

A foresight study on emerging technologies: State of the art of Omics technologies and potential applications in food and feed safety

Modeling Non-inherited Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance development and identification of response measures