IL A1. RECENT ADVANCES IN FOOD ANALYSIS

J. Hajslova, T. Cajka

Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague
Department of Food Chemistry and Analysis,
Technicka 3, 16628 Prague 6, CzechRepublic
jana.hajslova@vscht.cz; GSM: 00420602833424

         
The science of food analysis has been developed rapidly in the recent years. New analytical techniques have been developed and existing ones are continuously optimized. As a general trend, analysis systems have become fully automated including data processing. All this effort is aimed at obtaining more knowledge on a chemical composition of food since it is important to the health, well being and safety of the consumers. Besides of various sophisticated instrumental techniques, also a range of new technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and biosensors have been finding their place in food analysis. These new approaches are based on a rather new concept – the information about biological (toxic) effects rather than report on single target compound concentrations is delivered. The ‘biomarker and fingerprinting’ concept is the key to this strategy.

The ‘food safety crises’, examples of which include ‘mad cow’ disease, dioxin-contaminated feed, olive adulterated oil by mineral oils or Sudan dyes in curry powder and other spices, initiated a revision of food safety rules within the European Union. Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) shows that monitoring of chemical contaminants in food and feed is a very relevant tool in European food safety. Also consumers placed chemical contaminants on top of the “worry-scale” of food-related risks.

Currently, modern trace analysis aims at implementation of broad scope, rapid, and cost-effective methods with performance characteristics (such as accuracy, limits of quantification, uncertainty of measurement, etc.) complying with particular purpose. Particularly, the hyphenation of mass spectrometry (MS) to capillary gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) as well as the development of novel ionisation techniques caused an extensive spreading of this technique in this area. Both research and routine application have benefited from introduction of relatively inexpensive quadrupole and ion trap mass analysers and, at the end of the last century, the rediscovery of time-of-flight mass analysers (TOF MS) allowed further progress.