Real-life food-safety behavior and incidence of foodborne infections in solid organ transplant recipients.

Food-safety measures are recommended in solid organ transplant (SOT) recipients. However, the actual adherence of patients in a real-life setting and the impact on the incidence of foodborne infections remain largely unexplored. We performed a survey among SOT recipients followed at our institution, aiming to evaluate their food-safety behavior. We assessed the incidence of microbiologically proven foodborne infections by chart review. One hundred ninety-seven SOT recipients (kidney = 117, lung = 35, liver = 29, and heart = 16) participated in the survey. Overall, 17.7% of the participants observed all food-safety recommendations (22.0% avoided food at risk of contamination while 67.9% applied hygiene recommendations). Patients within the first year after transplantation (odds ratio [OR] 5.42; P = .001) and females (OR 4.67; P = .001) followed food-safety recommendations more closely. Although the majority of SOT recipients felt concerned and actively sought information on food safety (68%-70%), only 27% were able to recognize all risks of foodborne infection in hypothetical scenarios. Incidence of proven foodborne infections was 17.9% (95% confidence interval 9.9%-30.9%) 5 years after transplantation. Importantly, foodborne infections occurred exclusively among patients not following food-safety recommendations. In summary, most SOT recipients eat foods that make them at risk of foodborne infections. Our results indicate that there is room for improvement in patient education, particularly later after transplantation, and reinforce current food-safety recommendations.

Large-scale transcriptional profiling of chemosensory neurons identifies receptor-ligand pairs in vivo.

In mammals, olfactory perception is based on the combinatorial activation of G protein-coupled receptors. Identifying the full repertoire of receptors activated by a given odorant in vivo, a quest that has been hampered for over 20 years by technical difficulties, would represent an important step in deciphering the rules governing chemoperception. We found that odorants induced a fast and reversible concentration-dependent decrease in the transcription of genes corresponding to activated receptors in intact mice. On the basis of this finding, we developed a large-scale transcriptomic approach to uncover receptor-ligand pairs in vivo. We identified the mouse and rat odorant receptor signatures corresponding to specific odorants. Finally, we found that this approach, which can be used for species for which no genomic sequence is available, is also applicable to non-vertebrate species such as Drosophila.