Aims: To evaluate the conformity of the results obtained by the European Union (EU) National Reference Laboratories (NRLs) for the identification of Tropilaelaps spp. by morphological examination Modalities: Ring test consisting of sending a unique panel of samples, successively to each participating laboratory.   Requirements for participation:  Due to logistical constraints, this comparative laboratory test (CLT) is only open to EU NRLs, which have not participated in the two previous campaigns. NRLs from non-EU countries may also participate, depending on feasibility. Comparative laboratory test (CLT) methods: EURL procedure:  morphological identification of Tropilaelaps spp. (adult form) This method is also published in the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) Manual. Matrix: Microscopic slides (specimens mounted in Hoyer medium).   Provisional Agenda: Registration: January 2024 CLT period: From March to December 2024.

It is with great sadness that we were informed of the death of our colleague Brigitte Carpentier-Cerf on October 6, 2023.  She was a great scientist in food microbiology, internationally recognised for her work on the microbial persistence of pathogenic bacteria and biofilms in agro-food environments. Brigitte had worked at Anses for over thirty years and had been involved in EURL Lm activities from the outset, where she had led the work of the  working group in charge of the drafting of the 1st version of the “EURL Lm Technical Guidance Document on sampling the food processing area and equipment for the detection of Listeria monocytogenes”. Brigitte was a nice person, infinitely kind to colleagues and everyone she met, in particular the member of the NRLs Lm network. We miss her enormously, and her memory will remain engraved in our working community.

The EU RL for Bee Health held its 13th annual workshop on 10th October 2023 in Sophia Antipolis (France) after three years remotely. All participants were particularly happy to meet in person. Informal discussions were intense and the EU RL leaders had to kindly interrupt long coffee breaks to resume the annual workshop.   The participants had the pleasure to listen to two presentations of NRLs’ activities and the current honey bee health status in Estonia by Merle Kuus (Representative of the Estonian NRL) and in Lithuania by Tatjana Ščavlinskaja (representative of the Lithuanian NRL).   Franco Mutinelli, head of the Italian NRL, presented a state of play of the occurrence and surveillance of SHB in Southern Italy.  This year, Fayçal Meziani from the French Ministry of Agriculture presented the detection of small hive beetle in La Réunion island (France) in July 2022 and the action plan undertaken by the competent authorities. The French NRL presented the technical and scientific support provided to the competent authorities following the detection (Stéphanie FRANCO and Véronique DUQUESNE – respectively head and deputy head of the French NRL).   The EU RL also presented new information on the dissemination of Tropilaelaps over the world and focused on the feedbacks of the comparative laboratory test organised in 2022 and 2023 on Tropilaelaps mite identification by morphological methods. The workshop ended by the presentation of the EU RL activities during the last period and the work perspectives.   We warmly thank all the speakers for their interesting presentations and all the contributors for the fruitful discussions.   Documents and presentations of the workshop can be found here for the NRL network.    

According to Regulation (EU) 2017/625 (Article 101), the National Reference Laboratories shall, where appropriate, organise inter-laboratory comparative testing or Proficiency Tests between official laboratories. That is why the inter-EURL Biorisks Working Group on NGS organised a webinar on 29 September dedicated to "Proficiency Tests on Next Generation Sequencing: approaches in use at the European Union Reference Laboratories". This event, organised by the Inter EURLs WG on NGS, aimed at presenting the approaches used by EURLs: AMR, Campylobacter, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and VTEC for Proficiency Tests on NGS, to share experiences learnt and serve as guidelines for the organisation of Proficiency Tests on NGS at the Member State level. Presentations are now available on the website of EURL E. coli -> Here

We are pleased to inform you that the revision of EURL Lm Technical Guidance Document on sampling the food processing area and equipment for the detection of Listeria monocytogenes (Version 4 – 3 October 2023) has been adopted by EC Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (PAFF Committee) at its meeting of same day. The new version is available at the end of EURL Lm homepage: “Guidance documents”. This update includes new features adding the presentation of important concepts, such as persistence, biofilm or VBNC, and new guidance for practical implementation (link to data sheets and video tutorials). We would like to thank once more the representatives of 23 members from 12 EU Member States (MSs), belonging to NRLs Lm and other organisations which have collaborated with Graziella MIDELET, Léna BARRE, Adrien ASSÉRÉ, Bertrand LOMBARD and Thomas BRAUGE to draft this document.  

Objective: to evaluate the conformity of the results obtained by the participating laboratories for the detection of Paenibacillus larvae / Melissococcus plutonius, agents of American/European foulbrood. Methods evaluated: Microscopy Conventional and/or real time PCR Culture Matrix: Crushed bee larvae Provisional agenda: Registration deadline: 20/08/2023 Availability of samples to be tested:  September 2023 Requirements for participation: NRLs and official laboratories from EU Member States. NRLs from third countries (depending on the feasibility). Please contact the EU RL for more information.   Note: We inform you that registration is now possible using the online platform LEILA (Reference of the ILPT: PLMP23EU)

The discovery of unexpected, emerging contaminants and their by-products and metabolites or newly produced pesticides through suspected and non-targeted approaches is gaining more and more attention and open new horizons in many fields such as food safety, ecotoxicology, environment, health… Nevertheless, the process of moving from annotation to identification can be time-consuming, complex and fraught. The prediction of liquid chromatographic retention times (RT) by different approaches can be an useful and operational way to efficiently discriminate and select between several molecular formulas and between several molecular structures. The development of quantitative structure-retention relationship (QSRR) models, which are types of models allowing to establish a link between a chemical structure and a property, here the chromatographic retention time, requires an adequate selection of molecular descriptors necessarily obtained based on a chemical structure known. This requires also a selection of the best machine learning/IA algorithm and its optimization. Here we will present different strategies for the selection of descriptors, different types of machine learning/IA algorithms according to the different situations we are confronted with. These strategies may vary depending on the level of information/annotation we have. We will conclude by proposing a methodology based in part on QSRR to improve and secure the annotation process as it has been published by Schymanski and colleagues in 2014. We published this article in relation with this presentation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.talanta.2023.125214

EURL-CPS announces that the Proficiency Trial - 2023 dedicated to the enumeration of CPS is completely cancelled.

Last week, EFSA & inter-Biorisks EURLs working group on NGS organised the 2nd “Science Meets Policy” conference on “Using Next Generation Sequencing to tackle foodborne threats” in EFSA (Parma, Italy) & online. We had the chance to chair the session dedicated to "Effort on interoperability and the development of new standards". The outcome shows that: Protocols to get NGS typing data have been dispatched by EURLs, EFSA and ECDC have settled for the European Union the One Health WGS system to collect and compare it for E.coli, Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella, Other initiatives like GenomeTrkr in also in place in the USA, Efficient Implementations are possible in EU: Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and also in Norway. The final moderated discussion focused on the "Opportunities and obstacles in sharing genomic data for tackling foodborne threats". You can now access to the presentations: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/events/science-meets-policy-conference-using-next-generation-sequencing-tackle-foodborne-threats - the replay of the event will be soon available.