Quality Control and Food Safety

Innovative Analytical Methodologies Control
of Quality and Food Safety

 

Poster (Certificate) - Press release

 

Presentation

 

The research groups participating in this project are experts and pioneers in different scientific aspects related with the control of the food quality and safety. They joined their efforts in 2005 with the financial support of the Comunidad de Madrid and constituted an analytical platform to solve problems which had not been solved yet or which had an inadequate solution in this field. The aim of this platform was to be able to give a rapid response to the unresolved problems as well as to those problems arising in the next years related to the control of the food quality and safety.

Following this same objective initiated in 2005 and having shown the potential and complementarity of the research groups constituting this analytical platform, our aim is to continue working with the main objective of developing new analytical methodologies to achieve an affective control of the food quality and safety from the production system to the consumer. In this new programme (ANALISYC-II),  the most important and current aspects related with the food quality and safety are approached, including new problems raised in the last years and also new challenges based on the achievements already obtained, all these challenges having as a common link to decrease the risks of the foods we are consuming and to have healthier foods.

In order to control food safety the determination of exogenous pollutants (that can be introduced unintentionally in some point of the food chain), last generation pesticides, and veterinary drugs appearing in the environment will be performed. In the first case, a broad spectrum of pollutants will be investigated incorporating new compounds not included in the previous programme, such as emergent, toxics and/or persistent pollutants from an industrial origin (polychlorinated biphenyls derivatives; perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), polichloro-bromo biphenyls, brominated flame retardants and mercury derivatives). In the second case, last generation pesticides employed in agriculture (triazines, organophosphorous pesticides, and piretroids) and emergent pollutants such as veterinary drugs (antibiotics, estrogens, anti-inflammatory, and antiparasitic drugs) will be investigated.

With respect to the control of the food quality, analytical methodologies will be developed for the characterization of foods and food extracts and for the detection of new quality markers studying different aspects such as:

1. The detection of adulterations, i.e., the fraudulent addition of non allowed or not declared substances (azoic colorants, D-amino acids, vegetable proteins)

2. The study of the real composition of vegetable extracts and enriched foods with bioactive substances (species of Se, iminosugars, inositole derivatives, prebiotic oligosaccharides, bioactive peptides, proteins) for which determination no analytical methodologies enabling their characterization or quantification are available, or present important difficulties

3. The investigation of the presence of some compounds originated during the food processing (acrylamide and poliphenols addition products, volatile compounds originated in the Maillard reaction, oxidized lipids, etc.)

 

In both cases, innovative analytical methodologies will be developed enabling the reduction of the analysis time, costs and environmental impact and including sample preparation (fractionation, enrichment, etc. by SPME, SPE, MIPs, etc), separation in one dimension (GC, HPLC, CE) or two dimensions (GCxGC, HPLC-GC) and coupling of separations with optical and mass spectrometry detection together with validation, modelization, and data treatment.

 

 

Last update: May 07, 2014