GEN-MKT-18-7897-A
Aug 30, 2015 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
Smart food shopping starts with labels. However, what if we told you the ingredient list may not be all that it seems? According to Food Safety News, producers are sneaking lower quality ingredients into our food to save money. This type of food fraud is estimated to cost the global food industry $10 to $15 billion per year. If you think back to the Middle Ages, even our ancestors were consumed with cost savings by inserting nutshells, seeds, berries, and more within their spices.
To read the complete Food Quality report on the SCIEX LC-MS/MS solution, click here.
Safety and Ethical Problems Exist within our Food Supply. However, we no longer live in the Middle Ages, and healthy nutrients such as honey, olive oil, milk, spices, fruit juices, meats, grains, and even organic food are most likely to be plagued by false ingredients. Search the Internet and you can find a substantial list of what might be substituted for the real thing. This can be a huge problem, not only due to possible harmful side effects for consumers, but also due to ethical and religious concerns around food origin. In the Islamic community, for example, it is the law to monitor food, consumer products or other objects for permissibility. A very specific example is the testing of meat products for the presence of pork, which is forbidden in Halal-classified food products.
Move Over ELISA and PCR, Here Comes a Better Way to Test for Meat Authenticity: To address these growth safety and ethical concerns around food, and specifically meat, authenticity, a new meat species authentication method developed for Halal food verification using the QTRAP 6500 LC-MS/MS has recently been developed. Thanks to scientists at the University of Münster, multiple species were detected simultaneously while achieving the lowest levels of detection in cooked and highly processed meats. Many advantages were discovered over traditional methods such as PCR and ELISA, which are plagued with delivering false negative or false positive results, but also where sample degradation (particularly common in processed food products) can have a significant impact on the reliability of the results. The latest LC-MS/MS technology is not only sensitive enough to detect porcine contamination as low as one percent, but it is diverse enough to detect multiple species simultaneously, and utilizes multiple peptide or lipid markers from each species to help improve reliability in the results, even for processed foods. As a result, labs will feel more confident that when they report a positive result, it is indeed a positive result, and vice versa.
Committed to Progress: Meat is one of the most consumed food products in the world, and labs are increasingly finding new ways to test for authenticity and adulteration. “You are what you eat,” should remain true, and the SCIEX team is committed to helping labs get the testing done right. To view a list of reported food fraud risks, visit www.foodfraud.org. To read the complete Food Quality report on the SCIEX LC-MS/MS solution, click here.
Produced by certain moulds, thriving in crops such as grain, nuts and coffee, mycotoxins have contaminated agriculture and food production industries for a long time. To intensify the challenge, mycotoxins are resilient, not easily broken down and ensuring the safety of food supply chains requires comprehensive solutions and we are here to share those solutions with you.
Electron-Activated Dissociation (EAD) is transforming the fields of metabolomics and lipidomics by providing enhanced fragmentation techniques that offer deeper insights into molecular structures. In September, Technology Networks hosted a webinar, “Enhancing Mass-Based Omics Analysis in Model Organisms,” featuring Dr. Valentina Calabrese from the Institute of Analytical Sciences at the University of Lyon. Valentina shared her insights on improving omics-based mass spectrometry analysis for toxicology studies using model organisms, particularly in metabolomics and lipidomics. This blog explores the additional functionalities EAD offers, its benefits in untargeted workflows, its incorporation into GNPS and molecular networking, and the future role it could play in these scientific domains.
Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has gained significant attention in the clinical laboratory due to its ability to provide best-in-class sensitivity and specificity for the detection of clinically relevant analytes across a wide range of assays. For clinical laboratories new to LC-MS/MS, integrating this technology into their daily routine operations may seem like a daunting task. Developing a clear outline and defining the requirements needed to implement LC-MS/MS into your daily operations is critical to maximize the productivity and success of your clinical laboratory.
Posted by
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Share this post with your network