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Colleagues in the Agency recently held a workshop on the application of ‘omics technologies (examples are transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics) to food related research, bringing together scientists and policymakers from across the Agency, EU institutions and scientists in other government departments to discuss the use of these techniques.

Over the past few years these techniques have started to be developed to enhance the safety assessment of GM foods, and we are now seeing them being used in other areas of Agency research, such as food authenticity, chemical safety and nutrition.

The workshop was very successful in promoting some of the innovative research the Agency is funding, building on our scientific evidence base in these policy areas. The talks covered a wide number of applications of ‘omics technologies in food research, including metabolite variation in crop plants, metabolite profiling in nutrition and the identification of biomarkers of dietary status and cancer of the colon.

I think this is a good example of the Agency funding cutting edge research to support policy development (for example in food safety and nutrition), enforcement of legislation (food authenticity) and to ensure that the most up to date science is used in areas such as risk assessment (for example in GM food and feed and chemical safety). I hope that we can host more initiatives like this in the future.