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Kennedy and his team helped resolve a massive societal and economic problem for Bangladesh and ensured safer food for consumers worldwide. Nitrofuran antibiotics were banned from use in food animal production in the 1990s because of their carcinogenicity. However, large numbers of nitrofuran-contaminated shrimp were detected in Europe which originated from Bangladesh. This resulted in massive disruption to their shrimp industry. Kennedy and his team identified the complex cause of the nitrofuran problems and delivered a solution saving the shrimp industry from collapse. He then set about resolving a second, knock-on antibiotic crisis in the Bangladeshi poultry industry.
Professor William Stimson has led research into rapid diagnostic tests for the food industry from 1996 to the present day. These tests reduce the time for microbiological testing of food pathogens from 2-5 days to within a working day. The new technology is fully automated, uses less material and involves fewer manipulations than previously available kits, leading to a reduction in cost and time. A spin out company, Solus Scientific Solutions Ltd., has attracted €1.36M EUROSTARS funding for further Research & Development, and has created 24 jobs. Sales of testing kits produced revenue of £3.4 million by year end 2012, and have increased since this date.
Researchers at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC, University of Glasgow) were the first to develop methods and equipment for screening foodstuffs for irradiation. Their work led to new UK and European standards (BS EN 1788 and BS EN 13751) which provide protection and reassurance to consumers. Professor David Sanderson's laboratory is recognised as the world-leader in the detection of food irradiation. The laboratory is also the only establishment to develop, design and sell photostimulated luminescence (PSL) systems to detect irradiated food. Since 2008 134 laboratories worldwide have taken up these UK-manufactured PSL systems to prevent irradiated ingredients from entering the food manufacturing chain.
Research at the University of Reading into the origin of acrylamide, a neurotoxin and probable human carcinogen, in cooked cereal and potato products has provided crucial information for the food industry and government agencies. This has enabled important mitigation strategies to be developed. When acrylamide was unexpectedly discovered in food in 2002, there was no explanation for its origin. Pioneering research at Reading showed that it was formed during heating from naturally-occurring sugars and the amino acid asparagine. Because of this knowledge it was then possible to investigate factors affecting acrylamide formation and develop methods of mitigation. Subsequently investigations were undertaken worldwide, including work at Reading, to minimise the problem.
Richard Compton's group at the University of Oxford has developed an electrochemical sensor which uses multi-walled carbon nanotube electrodes to detect capsaicin molecules and related capsaicinoids — the chemicals responsible for the hot taste of chilli peppers. The technology, patented in 2008, has been licensed to the English Provender Company, which uses the sensors to perform quality assurance on 10 tonnes of incoming chillies every month, as well as monitoring reproducibility of finished products. In February 2013 Singapore-based Bio-X obtained an exclusive licence for the patent in Asia to develop, build and sell devices on a global basis. The science behind the technology has been the subject of significant outreach activities at UK schools, and has attracted extensive media interest.
The development and marketing of the Chemcatcher passive sampler has significantly improved the way water quality is monitored. These cost-effective devices are either used alongside or can replace established approaches that rely on infrequent spot or bottle sampling. We have contributed to the development of national and international standards for the use of passive samplers, and the dissemination of results to end users has facilitated the uptake of passive sampling technology worldwide. Our passive samplers have been used to monitor a diverse range of environmental problems, from pharmaceuticals in drinking water to the release of radioactive caesium after the Fukushima nuclear reactor incident in Japan.
The tropical root crop, cassava, is a food security crop for 450 million people in Africa. This case study describes the impact pathway from strategic research on transformation to make safe, cheap and valued products for food and industrial use, to impact on the ground in Africa benefitting 90,000 smallholder farmers with strong prospects to increase to 250,000 within eight years. The impact pathway involved using:
a) strategic research on cyanogen reduction during cassava processing, overcoming problems with mycotoxin contamination, improved processing and sensory evaluation;
b) adaptive research to develop market-based solutions to use cassava as a commercial/industrial commodity;
c) large scale impact on the ground in Africa through Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding and take up of the products by the private sector.
Evershed and his research group in The School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, have pioneered a suite of novel molecular and stable isotope analytical chemical techniques for provenancing amorphous organic residues in archaeology, particularly for the elucidation of ancient diet and the origins of agriculture. Their on-going research continuously achieves impact worldwide at all levels. Impact has been actively enhanced via the involvement of Evershed and his entire team in hundreds of public engagement activities (art/science exhibitions and festivals, personal presentations, media interviews/articles/documentaries), school and college educational outreach activities (teacher/student conferences, items/articles in the educational literature and contributions to educational films/documentaries). Critically, their `fingerprinting' methods have found application in detecting food fraud in the vegetable oil trade, protecting the human population worldwide from consuming impure corn oil for ca. 15 years to the present day. Most poignantly, when called upon, their methods were pivotal in solving a murder case for the Metropolitan Police.