Fingerprinting food: current technologies for the detection of food adulteration and contamination
Major food adulteration and contamination events seem to occur with some regularity, such as the widely publicised adulteration of milk products with melamine and the recent microbial contamination of vegetables across Europe for example. With globalisation and rapid distribution systems, these can...
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| Published in | Chemical Society reviews Vol. 41; no. 17; pp. 576 - 5727 |
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| Main Authors | , , , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
England
06.08.2012
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| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Major food adulteration and contamination events seem to occur with some regularity, such as the widely publicised adulteration of milk products with melamine and the recent microbial contamination of vegetables across Europe for example. With globalisation and rapid distribution systems, these can have international impacts with far-reaching and sometimes lethal consequences. These events, though potentially global in the modern era, are in fact far from contemporary, and deliberate adulteration of food products is probably as old as the food processing and production systems themselves. This review first introduces some background into these practices, both historically and contemporary, before introducing a range of the technologies currently available for the detection of food adulteration and contamination. These methods include the vibrational spectroscopies: near-infrared, mid-infrared, Raman; NMR spectroscopy, as well as a range of mass spectrometry (MS) techniques, amongst others. This subject area is particularly relevant at this time, as it not only concerns the continuous engagement with food adulterers, but also more recent issues such as food security, bioterrorism and climate change. It is hoped that this introductory overview acts as a springboard for researchers in science, technology, engineering, and industry, in this era of systems-level thinking and interdisciplinary approaches to new and contemporary problems.
Recent analytical detection approaches developed to ensure food security and to reduce global food adulteration and contamination are reviewed. |
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| Bibliography: | After having been schooled and worked in the picturesque South Shropshire countryside for 20 years, Will Allwood moved to Aberystwyth (Ceredigion) where he studied for a BSc in Microbiology and completed a PhD in the areas of metabolic profiling and molecular plant pathology. Will has since worked as a post-doctoral research associate for the Wheat Pathogenesis team at Rothamsted Research and for the last five years within the School of Chemistry at The University of Manchester, firstly on an EU funded project, META-PHOR Metabolomics for Plants, Health and Outreach, and secondly performing clinical metabolic profiling applications with Cancer Research UK. are broadly within analytical biotechnology, metabolomics and systems biology. His expertise involves mass spectrometry, FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy, as well as advanced chemometrics and machine learning. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Metabolomics, a founding director of the Metabolomics Society and a director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum. Victoria Brewster studied for her BSc in Chemical and Forensic sciences at The University of Bradford, and went on to obtain her MPhil in the application of Raman spectroscopic methods to forensic analysis. Currently, Victoria is developing spectroscopic methods for the characterisation of proteins at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, UK, through a BBSRC CASE PhD studentship in collaboration with Avacta Plc. Warwick Dunn obtained degrees in Analytical Chemistry at The University of Hull and moved to The University of Manchester in 2003 to develop and apply bioanalytical tools in systems biology research. He is employed at The School of Biomedicine as Lecturer in Applied Metabolomics and as the Metabolomics Lead in The Centre for Advanced Discovery and Experimental Therapeutics. Warwick has the research objectives to investigate molecular processes related to mammalian diseases and in discovery and development of therapeutics. Warwick is an International Board member of the Metabolomics Society and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Metabolomics. http://www.biospec.net Alexander Golovanov was born in Russia, where he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 1994 studying the structure of cobra neurotoxin using NMR spectroscopy. In 1998 he moved to the UK, and from 2001 was appointed Senior Experimental Officer and NMR Manager at The University of Manchester. In 2006 he joined the academic staff in the Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester, where he leads a research group and continues to work in the area of NMR applications to Structural Biology. Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the School of Chemistry, The University of Manchester, UK. His group's main areas of research David Ellis was educated on the Welsh coast at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth obtaining a BSc in Environmental Science and a PhD in Analytical Biotechnology/Microbiology. His research involving the rapid and quantitative detection of foodborne bacteria using FT-IR and machine learning has been widely publicised, featuring on BBC TV and radio, at the National Science Museum in London, as well as in the national and international press. He is now Senior Experimental Officer/Laboratory Manager for Roy Goodacre (biospec.net) and Douglas Kell's labs (dbkgroup.org) in the School of Chemistry, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), The University of Manchester, UK. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 ObjectType-Review-3 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0306-0012 1460-4744 1460-4744 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/c2cs35138b |