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Last Friday, September 30, the European Night of Research 2022 took place in Plaça Corsini in Tarragona. This event is held every year in more than 300 cities from different European countries, to bring science closer to the population. This scientific dissemination project is promoted by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 program.

In this year's edition, several members of TecnATox participated on different workshops: Bacteris i el seus misteris, Cervells endollats and Som PLASTICívors! The last one, and a talk on the origins of Alzheimer's disease were also presented in the Fundació "la Caixa" in the CaixaForum of Tarragona.

Finally, we want to thank all the children and adults who attended, for their interest and involvement. It was a very enriching experience for all!

TecnATox members, coordinators of the SEEDS project, participated in the transnational project meeting organised in a hybrid format, on 29th and 30th of September 2022 in Turin, Italy, with the participation of the representatives of all partner organisations involved in the project. The meeting was an opportunity to review the project progress, to organise the project activities and to assign the last tasks for the remaining period till the end of the project. The SEEDS: Substance of circular Economy concept as Efficacious Determinant for the development of Successful entrepreneurship project (2020-1-ES01-KA202-083137) is Co-Funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. More information about the project at: https://seeds.erasmus.site/es/

Pollution by microplastics is one of the most important environmental problems that humans face right now. In this line, researchers of TecnATox have just published a new article on this topic in the journal Water Research. The study focused on analyzing the concentration, morphology, and composition of microplastics in a drinking water treatment plant located close to Barcelona. The overall removal efficiency of the plant was calculated in more than 98%. According to their estimations, the intake of microplastics through drinking water would not be an important route compared to fish and seafood ingestion.

As every year, TecnATox was present in several events of Nit de la Recerca 2022. In the first of them, Dr. Montse Marquès gave a talk at INS Joan Guinjoan (Riudoms), entitled Endocrine disruptors: the chemical cocktail of our everyday life.

A group of researchers led by Dr. Vikas Kumar has recently published, in collaboration with investigators from IDAEA-CSIC (Barcelona), a new manuscript in the journal NeuroToxicology. This article presents very interesting findings on the effect of 3 pesticides on cell survival, permeability, and tight junction in an in-vitro model of the Human Blood-Brain Barrier. This study was performed in the framework of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie “Neurosome Project”.

An important delegation of TecnaTox researchers, including Jordina Balaguer, Saurav Kumar, Òscar Sabuz, as well as Dr. Deepika, attended the XVIth International Congress of Toxicology, which was held in the city of Maastricht, the Netherlands, from September 18 to 21, 2022. These researchers presented a number of posters focused on the following areas:

1) Artificial intelligence for predicting BBB permeation
2) In-vitro gut-brain axis along with microbiota for Neurotoxicity
3) In-vitro gut-immune axis along with microbiota for Immunotoxicity
4) Development of PBPK model for organophosphate flame retardant for Neurotoxicity in infants

A PDF copy of the posers presented in the conference can be download here.