High throughput toxicity screening and intracellular detection of nanomaterials

EC FP7 NANoREG (Grant Agreement NMP4-LA-2013-310584)Free PMC Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215403/With the growing numbers of nanomaterials (NMs), there is a great demand for rapid and reliable ways of testing NM safety—preferably using in vitro approaches, to avoid the ethical dilemmas associated with animal research. Data are needed for developing intelligent testing strategies for risk assessment of NMs, based on grouping and read-across approaches. The adoption of high throughput screening (HTS) and high content analysis (HCA) for NM toxicity testing allows the testing of numerous materials at different concentrations and on different types of cells, reduces the effect of inter-experimental variation, and makes substantial savings in time and cost.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Risk Governance of Emerging Technologies Demonstrated in Terms of its Applicability to Nanomaterials

Nanotechnologies have reached maturity and market penetration that require nano-specific changes in legislation and harmonization among legislation domains, such as the amendments to REACH for nanomaterials (NMs) which came into force in 2020. Thus, an assessment of the components and regulatory boundaries of NMs risk governance is timely, alongside related methods and tools, as part of the global efforts to optimise nanosafety and integrate it into product design processes, via Safe(r)-by-Design (SbD) concepts. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art regarding risk governance of NMs and lays out the theoretical basis for the development and implementation of an effective, trustworthy and transparent risk governance framework for NMs. The proposed framework enables continuous integration of the evolving state of the science, leverages best practice from contiguous disciplines and facilitates responsive re-thinking of nanosafety governance to meet future needs. To achieve and operationalise such framework, a science-based Risk Governance Council (RGC) for NMs is being developed. The framework will provide a toolkit for independent NMs' risk governance and integrates needs and views of stakeholders. An extension of this framework to relevant advanced materials and emerging technologies is also envisaged, in view of future foundations of risk research in Europe and globally

Evidence of West Nile virus (WNV) circulation in wild birds and WNV RNA negativity in mosquitoes of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, Romania, 2016

West Nile virus (WNV) is a zoonotic flavivirus whose transmission cycle in nature includes wild birds as amplifying hosts and ornithophilic mosquito vectors. Bridge vectors can transmit WNV to mammal species potentially causing West Nile Fever. Wild bird migration is a mode of WNV introduction into new areas. The Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve (DDBR) is a major stopover of wild birds migrating between Europe and Africa. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of WNV in the DDBR during the 2016 transmission season in wild birds and mosquitoes. Blood from 68 wild birds (nine different species) trapped at four different locations was analyzed by competitive ELISA and Virus Neutralization Test (VNT), revealing positive results in 8/68 (11.8%) of the wild birds by ELISA of which six samples (three from juvenile birds) were confirmed seropositive by VNT. Mosquitoes (n = 6523, 5 genera) were trapped with CDC Mini Light traps at two locations and in one location resting mosquitoes were caught. The presence of WNV RNA was tested in 134 pools by reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). None of the pools was positive for WNV-specific RNA. Based on the obtained results, WNV was circulating in the DDBR during 2016

Post-consumer plastic packaging waste in England: Assessing the yield of multiple collection-recycling schemes

The European Commission (EC) recently introduced a ‘Circular Economy Package’, setting ambitious recycling targets and identifying waste plastics as a priority sector where major improvements are necessary. Here, the authors explain how different collection modalities affect the quantity and quality of recycling, using recent empirical data on household (HH) post-consumer plastic packaging waste (PCPP) collected for recycling in the devolved administration of England over the quarterly period July-September 2014. Three main collection schemes, as currently implemented in England, were taken into account: (i) kerbside collection (KS), (ii) household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) (also known as ‘civic amenity sites’), and (iii) bring sites/banks (BSs). The results indicated that: (a) the contribution of KS collection scheme in recovering packaging plastics is higher than HWRCs and BBs, with respective percentages by weight (wt%) 90%, 9% and 1%; (b) alternate weekly collection (AWC) of plastic recyclables in wheeled bins, when collected commingled, demonstrated higher yield in KS collection; (c) only a small percentage (16%) of the total amount of post-consumer plastics collected in the examined period (141 kt) was finally sent to reprocessors (22 kt); (c) nearly a third of Local Authorities (LAs) reported insufficient or poor data; and (d) the most abundant fractions of plastics that finally reached the reprocessors were mixed plastic bottles and mixed plastics

A Strategy Towards the Generation of Testable Adverse Outcome Pathways for Nanomaterials

Manufactured nanomaterials (NMs) are increasingly used in a wide range of industrial applications leading to a constant increase in the market size of nano-enabled products. The increased production and use of NMs are raising concerns among different stakeholder groups with regard to their effects on human and environmental health. Currently, nanosafety hazard assessment is still widely performed using in vivo (animal) models, however the development of robust and regulatory relevant strategies is required to prioritize and/or reduce animal testing. An adverse outcome pathway (AOP) is a structured representation of biological events that start from a molecular initiating event (MIE) leading to an adverse outcome (AO) through a series of key events (KEs). The AOP framework offers great advancement to risk assessment and regulatory safety assessments. While AOPs for chemicals have been more frequently reported, the AOP collection for NMs is limited. By using existing AOPs, we aimed to generate simple and testable strategies to predict if a given NM has the potential to induce a MIE leading to an AO through a series of KEs. Firstly, we identified potential MIEs or initial KEs reported for NMs in the literature. Then, we searched the identified MIE or initial KEs as keywords in the AOP-Wiki to find associated AOPs. Finally, using two case studies, we demonstrate how in vitro strategies can be used to test the identified MIE/KEs

Citizens' campaigns for environmental water monitoring: Lessons from field experiments

Advanced sensing technologies, combined with wireless sensor networks, have already demonstrated their value in monitoring urban water systems, where management is rather centralized within water utility organizations. Environmental water resources, characterized by more diverse stakeholders and overlapping management responsibilities of different agencies, present more challenging contexts for implementing novel sensing technologies. Crowdsourcing by citizens has been proposed as an alternative approach for adaptive data collection that can augment the amount of data collected, as well as bring together the diverse stakeholders and citizens in more participatory water resources management processes. This article first introduces the challenges of designing citizens' campaigns for collecting data on environmental waters. A set of developed mobile phone and web applications is then introduced, integrated within a specific platform, as it was used in the execution of citizens' campaigns for data needed in flood analysis and management. Experiences and lessons learned are presented from the field execution of citizens' campaigns in two pilot areas located in Europe-the Danube Delta in Romania, and the Kifissos catchment in Greece. Two of the campaigns are on river data collection-water levels and water velocities, and two on collecting land use/land cover data. Surveys carried out with campaign participants indicate their appreciation of the initiative, but challenges remain regarding user-friendliness of the applications. Logistic issues such as timing, duration, and pathways for data collection impacted the motivation of participants. Overall, a unique and large dataset was obtained in terms of quantitative water measurements, despite data losses due to low raw data quality. Further work lies in evaluating the usability of this dataset for local authorities. © 2013 IEEE

Automating Software Development Process Using Fuzzy Logic

In this chapter, we aim to highlight how fuzzy logic can be a valid expressive tool to manage the software development process. We characterize a software development method in terms of two major components: artifact types and methodological rules. Classes, attributes, operations, and inheritance and part-of relations are examples of object-oriented artifact types. Each type is characterized by a set of properties whose values determine the membership of an artifact to other types. The relation between the property values and the membership values is defined by the heuristics that are typically expressed informally using textual forms in a natural language. The causal order among artifacts identifies the software process. Especially in the early phases of the development process, property values correspond to software engineer¿s perceptions

Citizens' campaigns for environmental water monitoring: Lessons from field experiments

Advanced sensing technologies, combined with wireless sensor networks, have already demonstrated their value in monitoring urban water systems, where management is rather centralized within water utility organizations. Environmental water resources, characterized by more diverse stakeholders and overlapping management responsibilities of different agencies, present more challenging contexts for implementing novel sensing technologies. Crowdsourcing by citizens has been proposed as an alternative approach for adaptive data collection that can augment the amount of data collected, as well as bring together the diverse stakeholders and citizens in more participatory water resources management processes. This article first introduces the challenges of designing citizens' campaigns for collecting data on environmental waters. A set of developed mobile phone and web applications is then introduced, integrated within a specific platform, as it was used in the execution of citizens' campaigns for data needed in flood analysis and management. Experiences and lessons learned are presented from the field execution of citizens' campaigns in two pilot areas located in Europe-the Danube Delta in Romania, and the Kifissos catchment in Greece. Two of the campaigns are on river data collection-water levels and water velocities, and two on collecting land use/land cover data. Surveys carried out with campaign participants indicate their appreciation of the initiative, but challenges remain regarding user-friendliness of the applications. Logistic issues such as timing, duration, and pathways for data collection impacted the motivation of participants. Overall, a unique and large dataset was obtained in terms of quantitative water measurements, despite data losses due to low raw data quality. Further work lies in evaluating the usability of this dataset for local authorities