Celine Vanhee

Sciensano · Chemical and physical health risks

Over the last decade, the consumption of tea and herbal tea has gained more and more popularity across the globe, but the potential presence of chemical contaminants (e.g. pesticides, trace elements, synthetic drugs) may raise health concerns. This study analysed selected teas available in Belgian retail stores and performed a risk assessment for t...

High value commodities such as spices suffer from occasional contaminations of both chemical and biological origin. Consequently, quality control and safety monitoring has become a pressing issue for the spice industry. Two recent independent studies showed that at least one third of the analyzed cumin and green anise spice seeds samples surpassed...

The tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT) is one of the most toxic proteins known to man, which prior to the use of the vaccine against the TeNT producing bacteria Clostridium tetani, resulted in a 20 % mortality rate upon infection. The clinical detrimental effects of tetanus have decreased immensely since the introduction of global vaccination programs, whic...

Background: Ensuring consistency of tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT) production by Clostridium tetani could help to ensure consistent product quality in tetanus vaccine manufacturing, ultimately contributing to reduced animal testing. The aim of this study was to identify RNA signatures related to consistent TeNT production using standard and non-standar...

The tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT) is one of the most toxic proteins known to man, which prior to the use of the vaccine against the TeNT producing bacteria Clostridium tetani, resulted in a 20% mortality rate upon infection. The clinical detrimental effects of tetanus have decreased immensely since the introduction of global vaccination programs, which...

This paper reports on the identification and full chemical characterization of the substance colloquially called “etonitazepyne” or “N‐pyrrolidino etonitazene” (2‐(4‐ethoxybenzyl)‐5‐nitro‐1‐(2‐(pyrrolidin‐1‐yl)ethyl)‐1H‐benzo[d]imidazole), a potent NPS opioid of the 5‐nitrobenzimidazole class. Identification of etonitazepyne was performed, on a sam...

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) and their corresponding N-oxides (PANOs) are natural protoxins biosynthesised by many plant species and are responsible for occasional fatal intoxication outbreaks due to the consumption of contaminated food. However, only in rare cases has the origin of the contamination been determined. Although their presence has be...

Background: Weight loss and sports supplements containing deterenol have been associated with serious adverse events including cardiac arrest. Objective: To determine the presence and quantity of experimental stimulants in dietary supplements labeled as containing deterenol sold in the United States. Methods: Dietary supplements available for sale...

The General European Official Medicines Control Laboratory (OMCL) Network (GEON), co‐ordinated by the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM), regularly organises market surveillance studies on specific categories of suspected illegal or illegally traded products. These studies are generally based on a combination of r...

This case series analyzes whether supplements categorized as containing novel ingredients in the National Institutes of Health Dietary Supplement Label Database are accurately labeled.

Introduction: Since its introduction, the e-cigarette has become a commonly used consumer product. In this study, we investigate whether regulatory changes had an impact on the quality of refill liquids (e-liquids) available on the Belgian market through analysis of their chemical composition. Hence, the nicotine concentration accuracy was investi...

At the end of 2017 and 2018 two different unknown suspicious preparations were encountered and were subjected to a plethora of different analyses in order to identify, if present, any bioactive compound. It turned out that these samples contained the assumedly cognitive enhancing research peptides Selank and Semax, which, to our knowledge, have not...

Personal lubricants and lubricants used in condoms contain a number of ingredients which are also present in cosmetic products. These have to comply to the medical device regulation (745/2017) which should provide the same level of consumer protection, if not more, as foreseen in the legal framework of cosmetics (1223/2009). In the current study we...

Facial treatments with dermal fillers for medical or esthetic purposes occasionally give rise to adverse effects, ranging from temporary effects such as reddening of the skin, to long term effects such as hardening of tissue. There appears to be a relationship between the lifetime of the filler product and the risk for adverse effects. The lifetime...

Hyaluronic acid (HA) has important applications in the field of orthopedics, ophthalmology and cosmetics. This polymer can be present in cosmetic products or can be used as a dermal filler. The latter frequently contains cross-linked HA. Today's methods to quantify the amount of cross-linked HA are not very specific. In this paper the development a...

The occurrence of illegal medicines is a well-established global problem and concerns mostly small molecules. However, due to the advances in genomics and recombinant expression technologies there is an increased development of polypeptide therapeutics. Insulin is one of the best known polypeptide drug and illegal versions of this medicine have alr...

LC-MS(n);geroprotective agent;anti-cancer agent

The Arabidopsis thaliana multi-stress regulator TSPO is transiently induced by abiotic stresses. The final destination of this polytopic membrane protein is the Golgi apparatus, where its accumulation is strictly regulated, and TSPO is downregulated through a selective autophagic pathway. TSPO-related proteins regulate the physiology of the cell by...

Counterfeit medicines, imitations, and substandard medicinesare a growing problem worldwide. The problem is situatedboth in developing countries as in industrialized regions. Inthe developing countries, the problem concerns the wholemedicine supply chain, especially essential medicines likeantibiotics,

What goes up should come down and vice versa. Cellular homeostasis requires that every signaling process involving up- or down-regulation of a given pathway should only be transient, and returning to steady state after a signaling process is as vital to living cells as being able to perceive and transduce changes of their environment. One of the be...

Plants are sessile organisms and therefore are affected by different environmental stresses, including salinity, drought, high light, high temperature or freezing (generically referred to as abiotic stresses). These conditions can be perceived, in part, as a transient or permanent water deficit and result in the accumulation of the stress phytohorm...

TSPO, a stress-induced, posttranslationally regulated, early secretory pathway-localized plant cell membrane protein, belongs to the TspO/MBR family of regulatory proteins, which can bind porphyrins. This work finds that boosting tetrapyrrole biosynthesis enhanced TSPO degradation in Arabidopsis thaliana and that TSPO could bind heme in vitro and i...

AtTSPO is a TspO/MBR domain-protein potentially involved in multiple stress regulation in Arabidopsis. As in most angiosperms, AtTSPO is encoded by a single, intronless gene. Expression of AtTSPO is tightly regulated both at the transcriptional and post-translational levels. It has been shown previously that overexpression of AtTSPO in plant cell c...

The Arabidopsis gene At2g47770 encodes a membrane-bound protein designated AtTSPO (Arabidopsis thaliana TSPO-related). AtTSPO is related to the bacterial outer membrane tryptophan-rich sensory protein (TspO) and the mammalian mitochondrial 18-kDa translocator protein (18 kDa TSPO), members of the group of TspO/MBR domain-containing membrane protein...

In the protein crystallization process, a growth unit has two possible molecular pathways it can follow from solution to the crystal bulk, namely, the process of direct incorporation from solution or the process of surface diffusion preceded by surface adsorption. We use real time in situ atomic force microscopy to monitor the molecular processes t...

The capillary counterdiffusion method is a very efficient crystallization technique for obtaining high-quality protein crystals. This technique requires a convection-free environment, which can be achieved using either gelled solutions, very thin capillaries, or microgravity conditions. To study the influence of a convection-free environment on pro...

In the protein crystallization process, a growth unit has two possible molecular pathways it can follow from solution to the crystal bulk, namely the process of direct incorporation from solution or the process of surface diffusion preceded by surface adsorption. We use real time in situ atomic force microscopy to monitor the molecular processes th...

Bacterial nodulation factors (NFs) are essential signaling molecules for the initiation of a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in legumes. NFs are perceived by the plant and trigger both local and distant responses, such as curling of root hairs and cortical cell divisions. In addition to their requirement at the start, NFs are produced by bacteria that re...

A study is presented on the crystallization of ornithine acetyltransferase from yeast, which catalyzes the fifth step in microbial arginine synthesis. The use of the counter-diffusion technique removes the disorder present in one dimension in crystals grown by either the batch or hanging-drop techniques. This makes the difference between useless cr...

The understanding of the basic processes underlying the crystallisation of proteins requires the use of very well-characterised model systems, for which theory and models of crystal growth can be verified experimentally. Triose phosphate isomerase (Tm TIM) [1] can be produced in large amounts, and crystallises reproducibly. It has been used for exp...