Advanced Targeted and Untargeted Approaches for Food Authenticity and Environmental Monitoring
This thematic area focuses on developing innovative methodologies to investigate complex systems in food quality, authentication, and environmental monitoring. By integrating targeted and untargeted analytical strategies, it combines spectroscopic, spectrometric, and electrochemical techniques with advanced chemometric approaches to enhance detection and characterization capabilities on real matrices.
Research topics:
Method development, optimization and validation to detect and quantify emerging organic contaminants, including perfluorinated compounds (PFAS), pesticides, pharmaceuticals and micro-plastics (MPs) in abiotic and biotic matrices (studying transport, distribution and accumulation mechanisms) by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS).
Studying transport, distribution and accumulation mechanisms of organic compounds in organisms and risk assessment of persistent organic pollutant (POPs) and emerging contaminants.
Development, optimization and validation of untargeted and fingerprinting methodologies for the authentication of foodstuffs and their supply chain.
Chemometrics approaches for optimized untargeted profiling analysis of High Resolution Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and hyphenated Gas Chromatography (GC-MS, GC-IMS) data.
Chemometrics and Machine learning strategies to develop multivariate/multiway calibration and classification based on spectroscopic techniques including UV-Vis, Infrared, Raman and EEM fluorescence. Focus on portable instrumentations.
Establishing validation procedures and documentation, including protocols, reports, and standard operating procedures
Methods for the analysis of isotopic ratios of stable and radiogenic elements by compound-specific IRMS mass spectrometry and high-resolution plasma spectrometry.
Analytical characterization of real matrices and production processes by separative techniques hyphenated with different mass analyzers, elemental and molecular spectroscopies and targeted/untargeted NMR-Profiling techniques.
Development of (portable) amperometric sensors for the determination of analytes of interest in real matrices.
Setup of electronic tongues for blind analysis of complex samples.
Researchers: Monica Caselli, Marina Cocchi, Caterina Durante, Andrea Marchetti, Guido Perra, Laura Pigani.