Actionable knowledge and strategic decision making for bio- and agroterrorism threats: building a collaborative early warning culture.

Current trends in biosecurity and cybersecurity include (1) the wide availability of technology and specialized knowledge that previously were available only to governments; (2) the global economic recession, which may increase the spread of radical non-state actors; and (3) recent US and EU commission reports that reflect concerns about non-state actors in asymmetric threats. The intersectoral and international nature of bioterrorism and agroterrorism threats requires collaboration across several sectors including intelligence, police, forensics, customs, and other law enforcement organizations who must work together with public and animal health organizations as well as environmental and social science organizations. This requires coordinated decision making among these organizations, based on actionable knowledge and information sharing. The risk of not sharing information among organizations compared to the benefit of sharing information can be considered in an "information sharing risk-benefit analysis" to prevent a terrorism incident from occurring and to build a rapid response capability. In the EU project AniBioThreat, early warning is the main topic in work package 3 (WP 3). A strategy has been generated based on an iterative approach to bring law enforcement agencies and human and animal health institutes together. Workshops and exercises have taken place during the first half of the project, and spin-off activities include new preparedness plans for institutes and the formation of a legal adviser network for decision making. In addition, a seminar on actionable knowledge was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2012, which identified the need to bring various agency cultures together to work on developing a resilient capability to identify early signs of bio- and agroterrorism threats. The seminar concluded that there are a number of challenges in building a collaborative culture, including developing an education program that supports collaboration and shared situational awareness.

Evaluation of industrial cutting fluids using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis.

In this paper we explore the combination of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and multivariate data analysis to evaluate the concentration and pH of an industrial cutting fluid. These parameters are vital for the performance of for instance tooling processes, and an on-line quality monitoring system would in such applications be very beneficial. It is shown that both the total impedance and the phase angle contain information that allows the simultaneous discrimination of the concentration and the pH. The final evaluation was conducted using the regression technique partial least squares (PLS), and this approach provided a way to quickly and easily find the correlation between EIS data and the sought parameters. The possibility to estimate both the concentration and pH level clearly indicates the potential of this method to be implemented for on-line evaluation.

On-line detection of microbial contaminations in animal cell reactor cultures using an electronic nose device.

An electronic nose (EN) device was used to detect microbial and viral contaminations in a variety of animal cell culture systems. The emission of volatile components from the cultures accumulated in the bioreactor headspace, was sampled and subsequently analysed by the EN device. The EN, which was equipped with an array of 17 chemical gas sensors of varying selectivity towards the sampled volatile molecules, generated response patterns of up to 85 computed signals. Each 15 or 20 min a new gas sample was taken generating a new response pattern. A software evaluation tool visualised the data mainly by using principal component analysis. The EN was first used to detect microbial contaminations in a Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line producing a recombinant human macrophage colony stimulating factor (rhM-CSF). The CHO cell culture was contaminated by Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus and Candida utilis which all were detected. The response patterns from the CHO cell culture were compared with monoculture references of the microorganisms. Second, contaminations were studied in an Sf-9 insect cell culture producing another recombinant protein (VP2 protein). Contaminants were detected from E. coli, a filamentous fungus and a baculovirus. Third, contamination of a human cell line, HEK-293, infected with E. coli exhibited comparable results. Fourth, bacterial contaminations could also be detected in cultures of a MLV vector producer cell line. Based on the overall experiences in this study it is concluded that the EN method has in a number of cases the potential to be developed into a useful on-line contamination alarm in order to support safety and economical operation for industrial cultivation.