Evaluating nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as a robust reference method for online spectroscopic measurement of water holding capacity (WHC)

Food authentication, current issues, analytical techniques, and future challenges: A comprehensive review

Food authentication and contamination are significant concerns, especially for consumers with unique nutritional, cultural, lifestyle, and religious needs. Food authenticity involves identifying food contamination for many purposes, such as adherence to religious beliefs, safeguarding health, and consuming sanitary and organic food products. This review article examines the issues related to food authentication and food fraud in recent periods. Furthermore, the development and innovations in analytical techniques employed to authenticate various food products are comprehensively focused. Food products derived from animals are susceptible to deceptive practices, which can undermine customer confidence and pose potential health hazards due to the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. Therefore, it is necessary to employ suitable and robust analytical techniques for complex and high-risk animal-derived goods, in which molecular biomarker-based (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) techniques are covered. Various analytical methods have been employed to ascertain the geographical provenance of food items that exhibit rapid response times, low cost, nondestructiveness, and condensability.

Application of principal component analysis with instrumental analysis and sensory evaluation for assessment of chicken breast meat juiciness

1. The objectives of this study were to use principal component analysis (PCA) to analyse the variability of the three instrumental and 14 descriptive sensory properties of chicken breast meat. The meat was cooked until the internal temperature reached 85°C and further cooked for 0, 20, and 40 min. The second objective was to identify the most critical variables for assessing meat juiciness.2. Cooking loss and moisture content exhibited high correlation with sensorial moisture release and mouth feel.3. The distribution of objects on the axes of the first two principal components (PCs) enabled the identification of three groups undergoing different cooking durations. The four major PCs explained 80.0% of the total variability.4. Cooking loss, moisture content, water-holding capacity, sensorial moisture release and mouth feel were demonstrated as the most effective variables for the first two PCs. PCA with instrumental and sensory analyses proved an effective procedure for systematically and comprehensively judging chicken meat juiciness.

Effects of Glazing with Preservatives on the Quality Changes of Squid during Frozen Storage

This study aimed to investigate the effects of glazing with sodium polyacrylate (SP) and D-sodium erythorbate (DSE) on the quality changes of squid during frozen storage. Frozen squid samples were randomly divided into seven groups: (1) CK (unglazed); (2) WG (distilled water-glazed); (3) SG (0.1% SP -glazed); (4) SG-1DSE (0.1% SP with 0.1% DSE -glazed); (5) SG-3DSE (0.1% SP with 0.3% DSE-glazed); (6) SG-5DSE (0.1% SP with 0.5% DSE-glazed); (7) WG-1DSE (0.1% DSE-glazed). The efficacy of the different coatings was evaluated using various indicators, such as water holding capacity (WHC), pH value, low field nuclear magnetic resonance (LF-NMR), color, malondialdehyde (MDA) content value, free amino acids (FAAs) content, intrinsic fluorescence intensity (IFI) and the total sulfhydryl content (SH) content. Intrinsic fluorescence intensity (IFI) and low field nuclear magnetic resonance (LF-NMR) were used as fast monitoring techniques to monitor changes in quality of squid samples. The results showed that compared with the CK and WG groups, coating with either SG or DSE alone resulted in reduced rate of moisture loss (p < 0.05), lipid oxidation (p < 0.05) protein degradation (p < 0.05) and prolonged its shelf-life. The combination of glazing treatment with SG and DSE (groups SG-1DSE, SG-3DSE and SG-5DSE) further improved the protective effects of coating, particularly in the SG-3DSE group. Therefore, the glazing of SG-3DSE is recommended to be used to control the quality of frozen squid and to prolong its shelf-life during frozen storage.

Inline Spectroscopy: From Concept to Function

The field of applied spectroscopy is strongly dominated by publications presenting proof-of-concepts, lab set-ups, and demonstrations. In contrast, the corresponding number of commercial successes of inline spectroscopy is surprisingly lower. This article discusses inline spectroscopy from an instrumentation perspective. It is the authors' firm belief that the success of inline spectroscopy lies in the understanding of how the design and implementation of the optical instrumentation affects the data quality, and how this in turn will limit or enhance the performance of the prediction model. This article emphasizes the need for a strong, multidisciplinary design team, whose design process is rooted in first principles, to bridge the technology "valley of death" and convert research in applied spectroscopy into commercially successful solutions.

Low field nuclear magnetic resonance and multivariate analysis for prediction of physicochemical characteristics of Atlantic mackerel as affected by season of catch, freezing method, and frozen storage duration

Fast and non-destructive prediction of the quality characteristics of food products during frozen storage are of great value both for the food industry and the consumers. The current study investigated the potential of using low field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) along with multivariate chemometric methods to predict various important physicochemical quality parameters in Atlantic mackerel during frozen storage, as affected by season of catch, freezing method and temperature, as well as frozen storage duration. The obtained results clearly showed that transverse relaxation data obtained by low field NMR can be effectively used to simultaneously predict multiple quality characteristics of the mackerel fillets through storage, including water and lipid content, water holding capacity, lipid oxidation (peroxide value (PV), and thiobartituric reactive substances (TBARS)) and lipid hydrolysis (free fatty acids (FFA)) content within the muscle. The NMR data could furthermore be used to predict variations in the muscle due to season of catch, the frozen storage duration of the mackerel samples when all samples were used, and whether the fish had been headed and gutted or stored whole, which freezing equipment had been used, and the frozen storage temperature for mackerel samples caught at the end of July. Simplified monitoring and optimization of these quality parameters in frozen mackerel with a fast and non-destructive analytical technique like low field NMR is thus of great value for the fishing industry.