Friday, March 29, 2024

Tech takes knife to food purity

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Modern technology hooking a heated surgical knife to a mass spectrometer gives cancer surgeons a real time indication of what to cut and what to leave, based on the smoke’s molecular content. Now the same technology is giving AgResearch scientists deep insights into food’s make-up, provenance and purity. After seeing it displayed at Mystery Creek Richard Rennie spoke to scientist Dr Alastair Ross.
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THE painstaking, time-consuming task of reducing a food sample to its molecular parts has become a lot quicker in recent months as AgResearch scientists use technology designed to reduce the trauma of cancer surgery.

As overseas markets and consumers increasingly demand proof of food provenance, particularly after high-profile scares like the horse meat scandal in Europe, AgResearch scientists have turned to the mass spectrometry technology to help unravel the mysteries of food origins. 

The Rapid Evaporative Ionisation Mass Spectrometer (REIMS) has intense smarts behind it. 

What it tells researchers about food can be delivered almost quicker than the machine’s full name can be spoken.

“Essentially, what the machine does is the same as it has done for the cancer surgeons. 

“The smoke generated by the surgical knife cutting through the sample is analysed by the mass spectrometer. What we get is a unique molecular fingerprint scientifically proving the food’s provenance,” Ross says.

The data feedback is quick and a huge contrast to the conventional methods requiring freeze drying a sample, grinding it, applying extractive solutions then separating molecules before detecting them using mass-spectrometry.

“The detail you get back through the standard process is amazing but it is very time consuming, almost two months by the time you get the data back. 

“If there is a company that wants to deal with a food origin crisis, that’s just too slow in today’s markets.”

Ross said the information REIMS gives is not as granular as the traditional methods but is detailed enough to give a wide breadth of information quickly.

“And the detail really is amazing. 

“From a four-second measurement we can tell what an animal largely ate, what sort of grass varieties it may have been fed, some genotype details, even what region that animal was from.”

Ross and his colleagues have been able to isolate distinct differences between Welsh, British and New Zealand lamb samples with a measurement that takes only a few seconds.

“Those differences came through as a combination of genetic, environmental and dietary information. We gain a multiplicity of parameters through this single test.”

A key difference between NZ and Welsh lamb is differences in fatty acids, something researchers suspect might be linked to dietary differences.

“Essentially, anything you can put an electric current through and draw vapour off can be applied to this technology.”

As grass-fed becomes more of a global selling point among protein producers, having equipment capable of justifying that claim quickly could have valuable defensive use for retailers and processors.

However, just as that grass-fed claim becomes more predominant, more processors also want to unbundle any unique nutritional benefits their products, from a particular country or region, might contain.

Work done by Nuffield Scholar Andy Elliot last year found greater consumer focus on health and nutrition is driving food technologists to search for health-giving compounds in products, with the products’ grass-fed/organic/free-range status more a baseline demand than the main purchase motivation.

“It leaves us thinking perhaps we should be doing a survey of beef from Northland to Southland to see if there are different nutritional aspects or benefits coming out of different regions.”

Researchers are also excited about being able to quickly match consumer preferences for some meat samples over others to different feed regimes.

“It means we can identify some of the compounds in meat that relate to the tastes that appeal more and less to consumers.”

Ross is excited by being able to create a feedback loop from consumers to farmers with the data, more closely matching a biologically produced protein to what the market wants.

NZ is closely scrutinising traditional ryegrass-clover pastures and looking for alternatives that will help reduce nitrogen losses.

The REIMS technology can also provide an insight to what a change from, for example, ryegrass to plantain might mean in terms of taste and palatability.

“We have been very focused on such pastoral changes but little thought has been given to what this change in diet may mean for the stock eating it and the products coming from them.”

Ross is also excited by the integral role the technology can play linking the disparate areas of food production in NZ, whether providing information for geneticists, food technologists, plant breeders or growers themselves.

“While largely for use in the research space at this point we can see the potential to torpedo false or dubious claims about products. It ensures complete transparency for products where provenance proof is often difficult and time consuming.”

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