Expert opinion on toxicity profiling--report from a NORMAN expert group meeting.

This article describes the outcome and follow-up discussions of an expert group meeting (Amsterdam, October 9, 2009) on the applicability of toxicity profiling for diagnostic environmental risk assessment. A toxicity profile was defined as a toxicological "fingerprint" of a sample, ranging from a pure compound to a complex mixture, obtained by testing the sample or its extract for its activity toward a battery of biological endpoints. The expert group concluded that toxicity profiling is an effective first tier tool for screening the integrated hazard of complex environmental mixtures with known and unknown toxicologically active constituents. In addition, toxicity profiles can be used for prioritization of sampling locations, for identification of hot spots, and--in combination with effect-directed analysis (EDA) or toxicity identification and evaluation (TIE) approaches--for establishing cause-effect relationships by identifying emerging pollutants responsible for the observed toxic potency. Small volume in vitro bioassays are especially applicable for these purposes, as they are relatively cheap and fast with costs comparable to chemical analyses, and the results are toxicologically more relevant and more suitable for realistic risk assessment. For regulatory acceptance in the European Union, toxicity profiling terminology should keep as close as possible to the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) terminology, and validation, standardization, statistical analyses, and other quality aspects of toxicity profiling should be further elaborated.

The multiscenario multienvironment BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB)

A new multimodal biometric database designed and acquired within the framework of the European BioSecure Network of Excellence is presented. It is comprised of more than 600 individuals acquired simultaneously in three scenarios: 1) over the Internet, 2) in an office environment with desktop PC, and 3) in indoor/outdoor environments with mobile portable hardware. The three scenarios include a common part of audio/video data. Also, signature and fingerprint data have been acquired both with desktop PC and mobile portable hardware. Additionally, hand and iris data were acquired in the second scenario using desktop PC. Acquisition has been conducted by 11 European institutions. Additional features of the BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB) are: two acquisition sessions, several sensors in certain modalities, balanced gender and age distributions, multimodal realistic scenarios with simple and quick tasks per modality, cross-European diversity, availability of demographic data, and compatibility with other multimodal databases. The novel acquisition conditions of the BMDB allow us to perform new challenging research and evaluation of either monomodal or multimodal biometric systems, as in the recent BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation campaign. A description of this campaign including baseline results of individual modalities from the new database is also given. The database is expected to be available for research purposes through the BioSecure Association during 2008.