Biomer Technology (United Kingdom)

IntroductionFood hypersensitivity (FHS), including food allergy, coeliac disease and food intolerance, is a major public health issue. The Food Standards Agency (FSA), an independent UK Government department working to protect public health and consumers’ wider interests in food, sought to identify research priorities in the area of FHS.MethodsA priority setting exercise was undertaken, using a methodology adapted from the James Lind Alliance—the first such exercise with respect to food hypersensitivity. A UK‐wide public consultation was held to identify unanswered research questions. After excluding diagnostics, desensitization treatment and other questions which were out of scope for FSA or where FSA was already commissioning research, 15 indicative questions were identified and prioritized by a range of stakeholders, representing food businesses, patient groups, health care and academia, local authorities and the FSA.Results295 responses were received during the public consultation, which were categorized into 70 sub‐questions and used to define 15 key evidence uncertainties (‘indicative questions’) for prioritization. Using the JLA prioritization framework, this resulted in 10 priority uncertainties in evidence, from which 16 research questions were developed. These could be summarized under the following 5 themes: communication of allergens both within the food supply chain and then to the end consumer (ensuring trust in allergen communication); the impact of socio‐economic factors on consumers with FHS; drivers of severe reactions; mechanism(s) underlying loss of tolerance in FHS; and the risks posed by novel allergens/processing.DiscussionIn this first research prioritization exercise for food allergy and FHS, key priorities identified to protect the food‐allergic public were strategies to help allergic consumers to make confident food choices, prevention of FHS and increasing understanding of socio‐economic impacts. Diagnosis and treatment of FHS was not considered in this prioritization.

Biocatalytic oxidation reactions employing molecular oxygen as the electron acceptor are difficult to conduct in a continuous flow reactor because of the requirement for high oxygen transfer rates. In this paper, the oxidation of glucose to glucono-1,5-lactone by glucose oxidase was used as a model reaction to study a novel continuous agitated cell reactor (ACR). The ACR consists of ten cells interconnected by small channels. An agitator is placed in each cell, which mixes the content of the cell when the reactor body is shaken by lateral movement. Based on tracer experiments, a hydrodynamic model for the ACR was developed. The model consisted of ten tanks-in-series with back-mixing occurring within and between each cell. The back-mixing was a necessary addition to the model in order to explain the observed phenomenon that the ACR behaved as two continuous stirred tank reactors (CSTRs) at low flow rates, while it at high flow rates behaved as the expected ten CSTRs in series. The performance of the ACR was evaluated by comparing the steady state conversion at varying residence times with the conversion observed in a stirred batch reactor of comparable size. It was found that the ACR could more than double the overall reaction rate, which was solely due to an increased oxygen transfer rate in the ACR caused by the intense mixing as a result of the spring agitators. The volumetric oxygen transfer coefficient, kL a, was estimated to be 344 h-1 in the 100 mL ACR, opposed to only 104 h-1 in a batch reactor of comparable working volume. Interestingly, the large deviation from plug flow behavior seen in the tracer experiments was found to have little influence on the conversion in the ACR, since both a plug flow reactor (PFR) model and the backflow cell model described the data sufficiently well. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 1222-1230. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Atomistic lattice calculations are reported of the structure, stability, phonon density of states and elastic properties of the series Bi2X2CuO6 (X=Ca, Sr, Ba), Bi2X2YCu2O8 (X=Ca, Sr, Ba; Y=Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba) and Bi2X2Y2Cu3O10 (X=Ca, Sr, Ba; Y=Ba, Sr, Ca, Mg). Comparisons are made with Bi2Sr2CuO6, Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 and Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3O10, which are close to recently discovered high-Tc phases.

(1982). A NEW APPROACH TO THE SYNTHESIS OF MULTICOMPONENT SEPARATION SCHEMES. Chemical Engineering Communications: Vol. 17, No. 1-6, pp. 273-284.

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