Assessment of Virgin Olive Oil Adulteration by a Rapid Luminescent Method

The adulteration of virgin olive oil with hazelnut oil is a common fraud in the food industry, which makes mandatory the development of accurate methods to guarantee the authenticity and traceability of virgin olive oil. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of a rapid luminescent method to characterize edible oils and to detect adulterations among them. A regression model based on five luminescent frequencies related to minor oil components was designed and validated, providing excellent performance for the detection of virgin olive oil adulteration

Rapid and innovative instrumental approaches for quality and authenticity of olive oils

The quality of virgin olive oils is assessed through the determination of several analytical parameters, whose values must be within the ranges established by the different institutions involved. In addition to official methods, there is a strong need for simple, rapid, and environmentally friendly techniques for the quality control of virgin olive oils and for addressing the challenging task of determining geographical origin and detecting adulterants. Toward this purpose, some of the most interesting applications based on optical spectroscopic techniques, on the measurement of electrical characteristics and on the use of instruments equipped with electronic chemical sensors, including also other promising techniques are herein discussed. These techniques, adequately coupled with an appropriate statistical approach, appear to be promising for assessment of several quality-related parameters. The prediction of sensory attributes and of the oxidative status of virgin olive oils have also been reviewed by adopting these selected techniques, which are also considered to be potentially appropriate solutions for identification of the geographical origin of virgin olive oils and to assess their adulteration with cheaper oils. Overall, the techniques discussed are promising and cutting-edge approaches for the establishment of useful portable instruments for in situ monitoring of the quality of virgin olive oils. Practical applications: The simple, rapid, and environmentally friendly analytical approaches discussed herein represent promising analytical tools for assuring the authenticity and monitoring the quality of virgin olive oils. Such innovative techniques and tools need to be ring-tested and validated. Some innovative reviewed approaches will permit to develop useful portable instruments able to perform in situ appropriate controls also by small laboratories or olive oil mills with limited technical facilities. These equipments will be potentially usable also by trained \u201cnon-professional analytical skilled\u201d people. Some other approaches, rapid but more expensive, will be applicable mainly by quality control labs and will increase the number of samples analyzed per day, thus fostering laboratory proficiency and an effective fighting against olive oil fraud

Avaluació d’estratègies quimiomètriques per a la quantificació de pigments mitjançant espectroscòpia de fluorescència

Treballs Finals de Grau de Química, Facultat de Química, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2023, Tutors: Ana Maria de Juan Capdevila, Joaquim Jaumot SolerFood colourings are additives very common nowadays in the food industry. Its main applications are to give a visual value to the food and to give the costumer an idea about the quality of it. Furthermore, other uses are to recover the colour that some products may lose during the commercialization due to light exposure, temperature changes and humidity. Moreover, food colourings are also used to enhance the natural colours of the food and its appearance or to give an idea about its condition. Even though its advantages, use of food dyes is very restrictive for human consumption. An excessive intake of food colourings may lead to a variety of health issues. Nowadays, those diseases are mainly related to allergies or hyperactivity. For this reason, the use of food dyes must be regulated, and their quantities in edible foods must be controlled. There are plenty of ways to analytically quantify food dyes. Fluorescence spectroscopy is an option to quantify food colourings which has benefits such as its high selectivity and sensibility. The main objective of this project is to take advantage of fluorescence properties to analyse mixtures of different food colourings with different complexity. Afterwards, different multivariate analysis strategies will be tested with the fluorescence data obtained to build models able to quantify different food colorants. Therefore, different chemometric models based on MCR-ALS were built considering the differences between the different fluorescence acquisition modes (single or multiple excitation wavelengths). As a result, the models built with fluorescence emission at a single wavelength using MCR-ALS and calibration constraints seemed to explain the data better than the models built with 3D excitation emission spectra using classical MCR-ALS constraint

Process monitoring and visualization solutions for hot-melt extrusion : a review

Objectives: Hot-melt extrusion (HME) is applied as a continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing process for the production of a variety of dosage forms and formulations. To ensure the continuity of this process, the quality of the extrudates must be assessed continuously during manufacturing. The objective of this review is to provide an overview and evaluation of the available process analytical techniques which can be applied in hot-melt extrusion. Key Findings: Pharmaceutical extruders are equipped with traditional (univariate) process monitoring tools, observing barrel and die temperatures, throughput, screw speed, torque, drive amperage, melt pressure and melt temperature. The relevance of several spectroscopic process analytical techniques for monitoring and control of pharmaceutical HME has been explored recently. Nevertheless, many other sensors visualizing HME and measuring diverse critical product and process parameters with potential use in pharmaceutical extrusion are available, and were thoroughly studied in polymer extrusion. The implementation of process analytical tools in HME serves two purposes: (1) improving process understanding by monitoring and visualizing the material behaviour and (2) monitoring and analysing critical product and process parameters for process control, allowing to maintain a desired process state and guaranteeing the quality of the end product. Summary: This review is the first to provide an evaluation of the process analytical tools applied for pharmaceutical HME monitoring and control, and discusses techniques that have been used in polymer extrusion having potential for monitoring and control of pharmaceutical HME

Phytic acid degradation by phytase – as viewed by 31P NMR and multivariate curve resolution

The 31P NMR method is a most direct and useful method to describe the degradation of phytic acid to lower inositol phosphates by the action of the enzyme phytase. The use of chemometric and CARS visualizes and helps in the interpretation of the results. By means of LatentiX it has been possible to visualize the time-dependent hydrolysis of phytic acid and by PCA the complexity of the phytic acid is shown in the score plots. By modeling the spectra in CARS it is possible to identify and quantify each of the inositol phosphates

Chemometrics Methods Applied to Non-Selective Signals in Order to Address Mainly Food, Industrial and Environmental Problems

Chemometrics is a chemical discipline that uses mathematical and statistical methods in order to extract useful information from multivariate chemical data. Moreover, chemometrics is applied to correlate quality parameters or physical properties to analytical instrument data such as calculating pH from a measurement of hydrogen ion activity or a Fourier transform interpolation of a spectrum. Aim of this thesis project is to develop chemometrical strategies for the elaboration and the interpretation of non-selective complex data in order to solve real problems in food, industry and environmental fields

Fast pattern recognition of malted and unmalted beer: An investigation using FTIR, UV-VIS, fluorescence spectroscopy and chemometrics

Beer production and consumption has increased worldwide during the past years. In this growing market, consumers have opted for products endowed with greater quality and diversity. In this respect, malted beers offer a more pleasant sensory experience. From a practical point of view, the high cost of production, when compared to the unmalted beer, passed on to the added value of the final product, then is common to encounter unmalted beers labeled as malted in the market. So, the characterization of beers into groups of malted and unmalted beers is of great importance for food control agencies. The present work reports a good alternative classification procedure that is fast, efficient, with no sample preparation using fluorescence spectroscopy associated with SOM (Self Organizing Map) and it is compared with the negative results (no pattern recognition) obtained with a FTIR and UV-VIS spectroscopy associated with PCA also performed with no sample preparation process

Development of innovative analytical methods based on spectroscopic techniques and multivariate statistical analysis for quality control in the food and pharmaceutical fields.

The increasing demand on quality assurance and ever more stringent regulations in food and pharmaceutical fields are promoting the need for analytical techniques enabling to provide reliable and accurate results. However, traditional analytical methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive and they usually require skilled personnel for performing the analysis. For these reasons, in the last decades, quality control protocols based on the employment of spectroscopic methods have been developed for many different application fields, including pharmaceutical and food ones. Vibrational spectroscopic techniques can be an adequate alternative for acquiring both chemical and physical information related to homogenous and heterogenous matrices of interest. Moreover, the significant development of powerful data-driven methodologies allowed to develop algorithms for the optimal extraction and processing of the complex spectroscopic signals allowing to apply combined approaches for quantitative and qualitative purposes. The present Doctoral Thesis has been focused on the development of ad-hoc analytical strategies based on the application of spectroscopic techniques coupled with multivariate data analysis approaches for providing alternative analytical protocols for quality control in food and pharmaceutical sectors. Regarding applications in food sector, excitation-emission Fluorescence Spectroscopy, Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) and NIR Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) have been tested for solving analytical issues of independent case-studies. Unsupervised approaches based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC) have been applied on fluorescence data for characterizing green tea samples, while quantitative predictive approaches as Partial Least Squares regression have been used to correlate NIR spectra with quality parameters of extra-virgin olive oil samples. HSI was applied to study dynamic chemical processes which occur during cheese ripening with the aim to map chemical and sensory changes over time. The rapid technical progress in terms of spectroscopic instrumentations has led to have more flexible portable systems suitable for performing measurements directly in the field or in a manufacturing plant. Within this scenario, NIR spectroscopy proved to be one of the most powerful Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) for monitoring and controlling complex manufacturing processes. In this thesis, two applications based on the implementation of miniaturized NIR sensors have been performed for the real-time powder blending monitoring of pharmaceutical and food formulation, respectively. The main challenges in blending monitoring are related to the assessment of the homogeneity of multicomponent formulations, which is crucial to ensure the safety and effectiveness of a solid pharmaceutical formulation or the quality of a food product. In the third chapter of this thesis, tailor made qualitative chemometric strategies for obtaining a global understanding of blending processes and to optimize the endpoint detection are presented