Award details

Tracing food commodities in Europe (TRACE) - (Fingerprinting and profiling methods)

Reference	BBS/E/F/00041907
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Ian Colquhoun
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Quadram Institute Bioscience
Department	Quadram Institute Bioscience Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	123,800
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/01/2005
End date	31/12/2009
Duration	60 months

Abstract

TRACE is a long-term major programme to develop traceability systems, both generic and specific to the following pilot sectors products: meats, cereals, honey, and mineral water. It involves over 50 European organisations and one from China, some of the work will focus on added value products labelled as of designated origin or organic. It will use an innovative combination of the latest methods in advanced scientific disciplines to create a cost-effective scheme to identify where and how foodstuffs were produced. The methodology could be extended to all food and animal feed. IFR is a participant (partner 9) in Work Package 2. WP 2 Fingerprinting and Profiling Methods (FPM). The terms fingerprinting or chemical profiling describe a variety of techniques that can measure the composition of foodstuffs in a non-selective way. The aim is to develop and validate fingerprinting methods for confirmation of the authenticity of foods i.e. conformance to declared origin or specification. In WP2, it is primarily organic compounds present in foods that are measured as opposed to trace elements or isotopic ratios. These organic compounds give rise to spectral signatures which are characteristic of the food composition while including interferences due to variation occurring as a result of natural events (e.g. weather, climate, disease etc) during growth or production of primary foods or batch to batch variations in processed foods or food ingredients. Interrogation of signals from sufficiently large and characteristic sample collections by chemometric techniques then has the ability to detect primary foods which are not what they claim to be or processed foods which do not conform with declared specification. Techniques used will include LC/MS and GC/MS at IFR and NMR, NIR, mid-IR and Raman spectroscopy at other partners.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Agri-food (AF)
Research Topics	Plant Science, Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search