Publicaties

Developing reliable methodologies for detecting and quantifying allergens in processed food commodities is crucial to support food business operators in allergen risk assessment and properly implementing precautionary allergen labels whenever required to safeguard the health of allergic consumers. Multiple Mass Spectrometry (MS) methods have been developed so far and applied for single and multi-allergen detection in foods, generating a ...

The spatial distribution of the physical properties of the first meters beneath the Earth’s surface is often complex due to its highly dynamic nature and small-scale heterogeneities resulting from both natural and anthropogenic processes. Therefore, obtaining numerical three-dimensional models that accurately describe the spatial distribution of these properties is often challenging, yet essential for different fields such as environmental ...

Autotrophic N2-fixing H2-oxidizing communities produced sustainable microbial protein as an alternative to food and feed based on the Haber-Bosch process. Their dynamics and complexity make it challenging to control the composition and evaluate the product safety. Based on the isolates from a previously enriched community and their metabolism, this research studied the potential of binary cocultures for the production of safe protein. Compared ...

The widespread use of High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS) for detection of plant viruses
and sequencing of plant virus genomes has led to the generation of large amounts of data
and of bioinformatics challenges to process them. Many bioinformatics pipelines for virus
detection are available, making the choice of a suitable one difficult. A robust
benchmarking is needed for the unbiased comparison of the pipelines, but there is ...

The gaseous hormone ethylene is an important plant growth regulator that controls many physiological processes and is involved in biotic and abiotic stress responses. The diverse action of ethylene makes it an economically significant growth regulator in both agriculture and horticulture, with many applications in the field. Ethylene is also called the aging hormone and causes rapid decay of fresh produce, due to the high ethylene production ...

Traditional monitoring of fish in the North Sea mainly occurs via trawling, yet this method is invasive and destructive to the environment as it disturbs the seafloor and causes bycatch of non-target species. Furthermore, due to regulations it is not allowed to monitor via trawling in certain important regions, such as windfarms. Recent advancements in environmental DNA (eDNA) applications offer opportunities for more sustainable alternatives ...

Local biodiversity trends over time are likely to be decoupled from global trends, as local processes may compensate or counteract global change. We analyze 161 long-term biological time series (15–91 years) collected across Europe, using a comprehensive dataset comprising ~6,200 marine, freshwater and terrestrial taxa. We test whether (i) local long-term biodiversity trends are consistent among biogeoregions, realms and taxonomic groups, ...

In Ethiopia, urban expansion happens at high rates and results in land expropriations often at the cost of agriculture and forests. The process of urban expansion does not include assessment of ecosystem services (ES). This has been causing unintended environmental problems. This study aims to uncover ES of three most important land use types (cropland, agroforestry, and grassland) that are threatened by land expropriation for urban expansion in ...

This report examines the economic strategies of Somali refugees in the cross-border economy of Ethiopia’s Somali region. The five Dollo Ado refugee camps were created between 2009 and 2011 in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. According to UNHCR registration data, they host around 220,000 almost exclusively Somali refugees within a semi-arid and isolated border district within which refugees outnumber the host population. The camps and host ...

Soil organisms are a crucial part of the terrestrial biosphere. Despite their importance for ecosystem functioning, few quantitative, spatially explicit models of the active belowground community currently exist. In particular, nematodes are the most abundant animals on Earth, filling all trophic levels in the soil food web. Here we use 6,759 georeferenced samples to generate a mechanistic understanding of the patterns of the global abundance of ...