Chocolate’s tasty flavors might pose a risk in other desserts

Genotoxic substances in baked sweets?

03-Jun-2024 - What makes chocolate taste and smell so delicious? Chemistry, of course! A variety of molecules work together to create that unmistakable aroma, but those same molecules might carry some unwanted health effects if there are too many around. According to research published in ACS’ Journal of ...

analytica 2024: Food analysis for sustainable nutrition

From PFAS to microplastics: focus on new harmful substances

16-Nov-2023 - From meat-free cold cuts to vegan salmon, the food market is changing. More and more consumers want to eat sustainably, but without sacrificing the taste of familiar products. “Modern analytical methods play a key role in the development of alternative foods, which is why analytica is ...

Salmonella Detection

Simple Colorimetric Sensor Rapidly Detects Food Contamination Using a Nucleic Acid Probe

19-Apr-2023 - A team of researchers have developed an easy-to-use colorimetric assay for the detection of food contaminated with salmonella. The assay is based on a novel nucleic acid probe that is cleaved by an RNase enzyme specific to the salmonella species. As the team report in the journal Angewandte ...

Food decontamination spray deploys "billions of tiny soldiers"

Researchers harness bacteria-eating viruses to create a powerful new weapon against contamination and infection

08-Dec-2022 - Researchers at McMaster University have created a powerful new weapon against bacterial contamination and infection. They have developed a way to coax bacteriophages – harmless viruses that eat bacteria – into linking together and forming microscopic beads. Those beads can safely be applied to ...

Structure of wheat immune protein resolved

Important tool in the battle for food security

29-Sep-2022 - Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Cologne in Germany together with colleagues from China have unravelled how wheat protects itself from a deadly pathogen. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, could be harnessed to make important ...

Sniffing out carcinogens in foodstuffs

Andrea Hochegger, an analytical chemist at TU Graz, investigates whether foodstuffs can be tainted with harmful substances from packaging or during production

27-Sep-2022 - Andrea Hochegger’s current research focus is the question of contamination with mineral oil hydrocarbons. “We break up complex mixtures into MOSH and MOAH fractions,” Andrea explains. These are groups of chemical compounds found in mineral oil. MOSH stands for mineral oil saturated hydrocarbons ...

White, red, and blue signals alert you to dangerous germs!

A simple, rapid method to simultaneously identify multiple food poisoning bacteria

01-Sep-2022 - Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed a simple, rapid method to simultaneously identify multiple food poisoning bacteria, based on color differences in the scattered light by nanometer-scaled organic metal nanohybrid structures (NHs) that bind via antibodies to those bacteria. ...

Consumption of extra virgin olive oil during pregnancy increases the level of antioxidants in breast milk and in offspring

13-Jul-2022 - The consumption of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) —a product with widely known benefits for our health— increases the level of phenolic compounds in breast milk and can cross the placental barrier, reaching the descendant. This has been stated in a study carried out by a team of the Faculty of ...

analytica 2022: Analytics that benefit consumer and environmental protection

Does your mineral water contain nanoplastics or other pollutants?

28-Apr-2022 - Is that asparagus really local? Has the honey been diluted with cheap sugar? “analytica provides food inspectors with all the tools they need to answer these questions quickly and reliably,” says Armin Wittmann, analytica Exhibition director at Messe München. At the world's leading trade fair for ...

New Salmonella Proteins Discovered

Only one small protein needs to be missing and salmonellae are no longer infectious

17-Dec-2020 - Salmonella are bacteria that can cause food poisoning with severe diarrhoea. If they penetrate from the intestine into the blood system, this can lead to sepsis, life-threatening inflammatory reactions in the entire organism. Since salmonellae are also becoming increasingly resistant to ...