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Oct 12, 2017 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
Did you know that the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), celebrates its founding each year on October 16 with World Food Day? You can explore their theme and commitment to ending hunger by 2030 here. As part of their, “Ten Facts You Need to Know about Hunger,” perhaps you may find it interesting that, “The world will need to grow 60 percent more food by 2050 to feed the growing population.”
To meet these goals, and in addition to the investments the FAO calls for, today’s researchers are tasked with analyzing food samples for integrity, authenticity, and safety. They must do it fast and with the utmost accuracy. It’s not uncommon, for example, to hear about the overzealous application of pesticides to crops. Alternatively, the injection of antibiotics into animals. In China, Melamine was found in milk. Horse meat found its way into ground beef. The list goes on. As scientists, not only do we wish for hunger to end, but to ensure food supplies are safe.
Therefore, to honor the FAOs commitment to ending hunger and promoting its safety we give you a recap of past food blogs. Hunger isn’t just a government problem, it’s a human problem, and after all, scientists are human.
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As an analytical strategy, middle-down mass spectrometry (MS) workflows characterize biotherapeutic proteins by analyzing large, digested protein fragments or defined subunits, rather than fully intact proteins (top-down) or digested peptides (bottom-up). A middle-down strategy combines the strengths of top-down and bottom-up approaches by delivering high sequence coverage and structural specificity while maintaining relatively simple sample preparation. In practice, middle-down analysis enables accurate mass measurement, rapid sequence confirmation, and localization of key post-translational modifications (PTMs) on protein subunits that are directly relevant to product quality.
In biopharmaceutical development, sequence variants (SV) are considered an inherent risk of producing complex proteins in living systems. Sequence variants are unintended changes to the amino acid sequence of a biotherapeutic and can be caused by errors in transcription or translation in the host cell, or cell culture and process conditions. Detailed analysis of SVs is important in process and product development to ensure the drug’s safety and efficacy. Even low‑level sequence variants can have significant implications for product quality, safety, and efficacy, making their accurate detection and characterization a critical requirement across development, process optimization, and regulatory submission.
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