Seminar: access all areas

Sensory Objects presented their research and their Sensory Labels for the British Museum at a seminar called Access All Areas organised by the Visitor Users Group.

Comparison of the portion size and frequency of consumption of 156 foods across seven European countries: insights from the Food4ME study

There are no standardised serving/portion sizes defined for foods consumed in the European Union (EU). Typical serving sizes can deviate significantly from the 100 g/100 ml labelling specification required by the EU legislation. Where the nutritional value of a portion is specified, the portion size is determined by the manufacturers. Our objective was to investigate the potential for standardising portion sizes for specific foods, thereby ensuring complementarity across countries. We compared portion size for 156 food items measured using a food frequency questionnaire across the seven countries participating in the Food4me study. The probability of consuming a food and the frequency of consumption differed across countries for 93% and 58% of the foods, respectively. However, the individual country mean portion size differed from the average across countries in only 16% of comparisons. Thus, although dietary choices vary markedly across countries, there is much less variation in portion sizes. Our results highlight the potential for standardisation of portion sizes on nutrition labels in the EU

Proposal for a unified nomenclature for target site mutations associated with resistance to fungicides

Evolved resistance to fungicides is a major problem limiting our ability to control agricultural, medical and veterinary pathogens and is frequently associated with substitutions in the amino acid sequence of the target protein. The convention for describing amino-acid substitutions is to cite the wild type amino acid, the codon number and the new amino acid, using the one letter amino acid code. It has frequently been observed that orthologous amino acid mutations have been selected in different species by fungicides from the same mode of action class, but the amino acids have different numbers. These differences in numbering arise from the different lengths of the proteins in each species. The purpose of the current paper is to propose a system for unifying the labelling of amino acids in fungicide target proteins. To do this we have produced alignments between fungicide target proteins of relevant species fitted to a well-studied “archetype” species. Orthologous amino acids in all species are then assigned numerical “labels��� based on the position of the amino acid in the archetype protein.