A foresight study on emerging technologies: State of the art of Omics technologies and potential applications in food and feed safety

This report consists of a review of the available scientific evidence on the state of art of omics technologies with a particular focus on applications in the area of food and feed safety. The report gives a description of the different types of omics technologies with respect to recent progresses made on the application of these techniques in chemical and microbiological risk assessment. Hereto, case studies were selected in order to cover different areas under the remit of EFSA. In this review each case study has been investigated with respect to its hazard, experimental methodologies, (statistical) data analysis and its link to food/feed safety risk assessment. Finally, the added value of omics technologies as compared to classical risk assessment and current limitations of omics technologies for their application in chemical and microbiological food safety risk assessment has been discussed. This investigation shows that most of the studies on chemical agents focus on mode of action identification and a search for biomarkers using transcriptomics. As for microbial food safety, omics have not yet been successfully applied often. When applied, they never target the host, but focus on aspects of the pathogen, e.g. in detection or source attribution. © National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Institute of Food Research (IFR), Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek, part of Wageningen University and Research Center (DLO), University of Amsterdam (UvA), 2013