National Center for Toxicological Research, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA.
Office of Regulatory Affairs, Office of Regulatory Science, Arkansas Laboratory, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA.
Molecules. 2021 Jan 28;26(3):685. doi: 10.3390/molecules26030685.
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are a serious food safety concern due to their persistence and toxic effects. To promote food safety and protect human health, it is important to understand the sources of POPs and how to minimize human exposure to these contaminants. The POPs Program within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), manually evaluates congener patterns of POPs-contaminated samples and sometimes compares the finding to other previously analyzed samples with similar patterns. This manual comparison is time consuming and solely depends on human expertise. To improve the efficiency of this evaluation, we developed software to assist in identifying potential sources of POPs contamination by detecting similarities between the congener patterns of a contaminated sample and potential environmental source samples. Similarity scores were computed and used to rank potential source samples. The software has been tested on a diverse set of incurred samples by comparing results from the software with those from human experts. We demonstrated that the software provides results consistent with human expert observation. This software also provided the advantage of reliably evaluating an increased sample lot which increased overall efficiency.
持久性有机污染物（POPs）因其持久性和毒性效应而成为严重的食品安全问题。为了促进食品安全和保护人类健康，了解 POPs 的来源以及如何最大限度地减少人类对这些污染物的接触非常重要。美国食品和药物管理局（FDA）的持久性有机污染物计划手动评估受 POPs 污染的样本的同系物模式，有时还将发现结果与其他具有类似模式的先前分析样本进行比较。这种手动比较既耗时又完全依赖于人类专业知识。为了提高这种评估的效率，我们开发了软件，通过检测污染样本的同系物模式与潜在环境源样本之间的相似性，来帮助识别 POPs 污染的潜在来源。计算了相似度得分，并用于对潜在源样本进行排名。通过将软件的结果与人类专家的结果进行比较，我们在一组不同的实际样本上对该软件进行了测试。我们证明了该软件提供的结果与人类专家观察结果一致。该软件还具有可靠评估大量增加的样本的优势，从而提高了整体效率。
