The latest issue of IFR News (Issue 2.00) describes
some of our most recent publications.
Understanding Evolution: Ian Roberts and Steve
James, with colleagues from the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, are
trying to understand how chromosomes evolve. Their research, published in
Nature, has shown that rearrangement of large chunks of chromosomes is not
the entire picture. Techniques developed for studying the yeast genome
will eventually assist scientists to understand the human genome.
Alarmist Reporting: How does media reporting
influence public opinion? Lynn Frewer and colleagues have examined
how newspapers in Sweden and the UK reported a variety of risks, focusing
on the two months around the 10th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident (a
high profile media event). In both countries, reports about hazards
generally tended to be alarmist rather than reassuring, and rarely used
statistics to express degrees of risk. Differences in the pattern of
reporting about BSE may have implication for national differences in the
way this risk is perceived by the public.
Do Chromium Supplements Help Diabetics? Collaborative
work between IFR, the Bertram Diabetes Research Unit at the West Norwich
Hospital, and the Central Science Laboratory in York suggests not.
Chromium is essential for the control of insulin action, so this study
investigated whether moderate supplementation with chromium rich yeast
improved patients' control of their blood sugar levels. The study, along
with other published work, suggests that further work to understand the
action of chromium is needed in order to optimise its effects.
The Best of Health: IFR is always looking to reach
wider audiences with information on the relevance of science to our
society. An article in the current issue of Biological Sciences Review (a
magazine for 16-18 year old science students) introduces work on minerals
and bioavailability. Linda Harvey and Sue Fairweather-Tait define
bioavailability, tabulate recommended mineral intakes, discuss how mineral
absorption is measured and describe recent research on iron, selenium and
copper.
A Powerful Tool for Hazard Analysis: Computer-based
models, called Bayesian Belief Networks, can be used to evaluate
information that is relevant to food safety assessments. Gary Barker has
used Bayesian Belief Networks to model hazards ranging from those
associated with spore-forming bacteria to those attributed to natural
toxicants. These can be powerful tools for hazard analysis even when there
is a restricted information supply.
Analysing Natural Substances in Foods: A new
book by Fred Mellon (IFR), Ron Self (University of East Anglia) and Jim
Startin (Central Science Laboratory, York) introduces the principles,
practice and applications of mass spectrometric techniques in the study of
natural substances in foods. Mass Spectrometry is widely used in food
quality, safety and nutrition studies and in biopolymer analysis.
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