Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Development of new sustainable analytical methods for the determinatio...
Highlights
Coordinator
The task includes evaluation of safety parameters in traditional and novel foods through the development of: a) chemical sensors and immunosensors for the selective detection of algal and plant toxins, and trace allergens; b) portable devices based on laser photoacoustic spectroscopy (LPAS) and other spectroscopy techniques; c) Ambient Desorption Ionisation methods with High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (DESI-HRMS); e) use of rt-PCR and digital droplet-PCR to evaluate new and (re)-emerging foodborne pathogenic species; f) metabolomics and proteomics strategies coupled to pathway analysis to evaluate the effects of emerging and re-emerging contaminants; d) analytical techniques, i.e., spectroscopic and MS-based, to determine biogenic amines, pesticides, veterinary drug residues, mycotoxins and processing toxicants; and g) new Matrix-Reference Materials to be characterised for food safety parameters will be developed, including preparation of test-lots, their characterization and homogeneity and stability studies.
Safety assessment of traditional and novel foods through targeted and untargeted methodologies (M36)
Report on the development and testing of new analytical techniques for targeted analysis of contaminants (M36)
Food safety is a major international concern. In fact, a huge number of foodborne acute and chronic diseases are related to the consumption of contaminated food. Quality and safety of the food can be affected at any stage of the food supply chain by several contaminants, including, mycotoxins, veterinary drugs, proteins, metals, hormones, pesticides, and adulterants. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing demand for reliable analytical methods that enable rapid screening of food commodities for contaminants.
However, food analysis is challenging due to the complexity of the matrices. Among the various stages of the analytical process, sample preparation is indeed a prerequisite for the attainment of reliable results and represents the most critical and time-consuming stage of the workflow, regardless of the instrumentation used for the analysis, making related technological advances crucial for the development of innovative analytical methods.
Various food products will be targeted for the development of innovative, analytical methods, based on chromatography and mass spectrometry, for the determination of different contaminants at low concentration levels. The main innovations that will characterize the analytical methods will concern the extraction step, using both commercial and newly designed extraction devices, which will be based of new polymer matrices capable of selectively extracting analytes. An attentive focus will regard i. the production of biocompatible and self-assembling melanin-like polymers under waterish, green conditions, starting from eco-friendly monomers (e.g. dopamine), ii. the modulation of the polymer chemical and physical features (surface charge, protrusion functional groups, network structures) using a combination of different co-polymerizing monomers (dopamine, l-dopa, tyramine, caffeic acid, tyrosine) and iii. the optimization of the polymer bulk using an in situ chemical modification approach towards the increase of the selectivity.
The development of new, rapid, sensitive, and reliable analytical methods for detection and quantification of various analytes in food will enable the screening of a considerable number of food products. The use of both consolidated and highly innovative extraction methods will allow to achieve the double result of providing reliable answers to the needs of the territory and producing newly designed extraction devices which use innovative biocompatible polymer matrices. The cost-effectiveness, the green and sustainable aspect, and the universality of the synthetic methods of these active matrices will be demonstrated. Through different optimization processes, the increase of the specificity of the matrices towards some analytes will become an improvement point, and the versatility of the extraction methods towards complex food matrices together with the integrability of the microextraction devices in scaled processes will be proven as a downstream part of serial processing.
