Determination of the most informative chemical elements for discrimination of rice samples according to the producing region.

Several approaches to assess the authenticity of food products have been developed, given that fraudulent products may impact consumers' confidence, affect commercial trades and lead to health risks. This paper proposes an approach to identify the chemical elements that optimally discriminate rice samples according to their producing region in the South of Brazil, the largest rice producer outside Asia. A combinatorial procedure on the concentration of 26 elements determined using inductively coupled mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and liquid chromatography hyphenated with ICP-MS from 640 rice samples was coupled with Support Vector Machine.

On the crucial role of multilingual biomedical databases in epidemic events (SARS-CoV-2 analysis).

The need for multilingual biomedical databases was already pointed out by different authors. They argue about the need for making translations available in other languages and centralized access to regional databases and that one should not disregard citations in other languages. This fact could not be any more real in the current situation regarding the novel coronavirus.