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As part of a European Union-funded project (FP7) developing 'Integrated approaches to food allergen and allergy management', a database was constructed based on publicly available information on food allergen recalls in Europe, North America, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Over 2000 entries were made into the database. The database covers a 4-year period from 2011 to 2014 and each entry is categorised into food type (two different classifications), identified allergen and cause where indicated by the authorities. Across different authorities, by far the biggest incidence of undeclared allergens occurred in the food categories of prepared dishes and snacks (range = 12-53%), and cereals and bakery products (range = 14-25% of all recalls and/or alerts). The biggest incidence of undeclared allergens, according to the information from most authorities, occurred for milk and milk products (16-31% of all products with recall or alert), followed by cereals containing gluten (9-19%), soy (5-45%), and egg and egg products (5-17%). Although 42-90% of the products with recalls/alerts were explained as being 'Not indicated on the label', this is a generic explanation of cause and does not provide much insight into the causes of the recall/alerts. However, 0-17% of products with recalls/alerts could be coded as caused by the unintended presence of an allergen as the probable result of cross-contact in production. Construction of the database of allergen recalls has provided some important lessons and recommendations to the authorities are made in this paper in terms of the harmonisation of the reporting of allergen recalls into a more standardised format.

Phototrophic biofilms seem to be suitable candidates for tertiary wastewater treatment due to their high uptake capacity for nutrients and other pollutants, also taking into account the time and cost savings derived from easy procedures for biomass harvesting. Biomass accrual, structure, and physiology of biofilms affect the efficiency of nutrient removal by its microbial community. Here, we construct a biofilm consisting of a cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. and the green alga Chlorococcum sp. and determine the effect of combined variations of irradiance and temperature on the biofilm structure and function. The two species were isolated from phototrophic biofilms naturally developing in an Italian wastewater treatment plant and grown in a microcosm designed for biofilm investigations. Phototrophic biomass accumulation, percent species composition, photosynthetic response and the amount and composition of capsular polysaccharides (CPS), including anionic residues, are reported. The results showed that biofilm development required relatively moderate irradiances (60 μmol photons m −2 s −1 ) below which development was arrested. Both light and temperature had a strong effect on the composition of each species to the biofilm. The CPS compositions also changed with temperature, light and species composition. The CPS of the greenalgal-dominated biofilm had the higher uronic acid content indicating a potential to exploit green algae in the treatment of waste contaminated with heavy metals. Given the knowledge of the response of certain species to light and temperature combinations, it may be possible to construct biofilms of known species and CPS composition to use them for specific applications.

In the present study, biomass development and changes in community composition of phototrophic biofilms grown under different controlled ambient conditions (light, temperature and flow) were examined. Source communities were taken from a wastewater treatment plant and used to inoculate growth surfaces in a semi-continuous-flow microcosm. We recorded biofilm growth curves in cultures over a period of 30 days across 12 experiments. Biovolume of phototrophs and community composition for taxonomic shifts were also obtained using light and electron microscopy. Species richness in the cultured biofilms was greatly reduced with respect to the natural samples, and diversity decreased even further during biofilm development. Diadesmis confervacea, Phormidium spp., Scenedesmus spp. and Synechocystis spp. were identified as key taxa in the microcosm. While a significant positive effect of irradiance on biofilm growth could be identified, impacts of temperature and flow rate on biofilm development and diversity were less evident. We discuss the hypothesis that biofilm development could have been subject to multistability, i.e. the existence of several possible stable biofilm configurations for the same set of environmental parameters; small variations in the species composition might have been sufficient to switch between these different configurations and thus have contributed to overwriting the original effects of temperature and flow velocity.