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Nov 20, 2015 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
Before you start wondering if you should buy organic ingredients this Thanksgiving, it is good to know regulating bodies set and monitor allowable pesticide limits within our food supply. Pesticides that help control pests, disease, and deter unwanted animals from eating supplies found in fields, mills, and facilities. How and when this testing takes place in the United States is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) according to five primary regulating statutes.
Subsequently the FDA and the USDA test domestic and international foods for which standards are set based on risk assessment. The next step is for the supplier to submit a food sample to a testing lab using proper sampling techniques. Although it is argued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not perform enough testing.
What Happens When Food Meets the Lab?
For the sake of this post, I will focus on what happens when the food samples meet the lab technicians. Mass spectrometry is a highly successful testing method for high-throughput routine pesticide testing, screening, quantitation, and confirmation. If a fruit or vegetable contains residue, this procedure will find it. Instrumentation such as the X500R QTOF Mass Spectrometer can make conventional pesticide testing a breeze for any lab. Factor in the SCIEX OS software platform and data processing becomes quick, efficient and accurate. Multi-pesticide testing is much more comprehensive than single sample testing and can be achieved using the SCIEX Pesticide Library, which maintains more than 550 pesticides with completely acquired spectra to compliment analysis.
Science is on top of pesticides not only in fruits and vegetables but grains as well as they can contain mycotoxins that can lead to serious illness or worse in some instances. Key mycotoxins such as Ochratoxin A, Deoxynivalenol and Zearalenone can be analysed by labs using the Rapid iMethod Test, a complete and validated solution to ensure low-level mycotoxin detection. To ensure the best quality data from samples labs would want to incorporate the Mycotoxin Library, which contains more than 280 compounds.
2014 Pesticide Residue Results
SCIEX is dedicated to providing solutions for food manufacturers, providers and testing laboratories in their quest to deliver the safest food so that we can all enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner. In 2014, pesticide residue turned up in more than half of food tested by the U.S. government although most were within acceptable limits.
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.
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