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Development of innovative techniques for food authentication - the last barrier to prevent food fraud

University of British Columbia

Food fraud was estimated to cost the global food industry $10-15 billion per year. Various traceability and risk assessment systems have been developed to deter food fraud. With rapid globalization and complex supply chain, effective product tracing and tracking and accurate vulnerability assessment have been inevitably hindered. Serving as the last barrier to ensure food authenticity, reliable techniques to identify fraudulent foods are indispensable. Traditional techniques (e.g. liquid chromatography-based assays) are usually time-consuming, labor- intensive, lack the sensitivity and/or specificity, and/or complicated. Therefore, the overall objective of my Ph.D. thesis project was to validate the feasibility of spectroscopic techniques [i.e. Raman, mid-infrared, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopies] and an advanced DNA amplification method [i.e. loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP)] to detect food fraud. During my studies, an optimized protocol was developed to authenticate ground beef meat and identify and quantify the offal adulterants using mid-infrared spectroscopy coupled with chemometric models, providing a limit of detection (LOD) <10% w/w of offal in ground beef meat. With simple/no sample pretreatment, solution NMR spectroscopy and solid-state NMR spectroscopy were confirmed to detect 6.7 and 128.6 mg/kg Sudan I in paprika powder in <30 min, respectively. A confocal micro-Raman spectrometer and a portable Raman spectrometer were applied to identify 11 species of raw finfish purchased from seafood markets in Vancouver. The method developed using the portable Raman spectrometer exhibited promising results with a 100% accuracy in differentiating Salmonidae and non-Salmonidae, 88% accuracy in identifying four species of salmon, and 91% accuracy in separating the seven species of non-Salmonidae fish. A LAMP-based assay was developed to authenticate pure pomegranate juice from juice adulterated by apple and/or grape juice. With a novel paper-based DNA extraction device and a simple LAMP result visualization method, the overall sample-to-result analysis was completed in ~1 h with a LOD of 10~100 ng of DNA. Methods and devices developed in my studies may be used to authenticate many other food commodities and have the potential to be adopted by governmental laboratories, food industries and even consumers to rapidly authenticate food products, and thus better ensure the integrity of foods.

Text

2020-01-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/68040

Food Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/