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This research is funded by National Science Center (grant no.2011/03/N/ST4/00713)
Nowadays, fit, bio or eco lifestyle gained a great popularity. The followers of these kind of lifestyle(s) are aware of the importance of quality and origin of food commodities. The foods known as the insurance of long and healthy life is the foods they reach for. One of most popular constituents of such commodities are antioxidants known for preventing may diseases and inhibiting the aging process. Although, they are present in almost each food commodity their content varies. Therefore the content is often recognized as one of quality markers of foods.
Researchers developed various chemical assays suitable to evaluate the total antioxidant capacity (TAC) of food samples known as antioxidant assays. Even though the assays are easy to perform, they are time and reagent-consuming procedures. Therefore the information of TAC is not yet widely available on the food commodities labels. It is known that many antioxidants are fluorescent compounds, thus they can be observed during advanced fluorescence measurements regarded as taking fluorescence photo of sample. They are fast and nondestructive measurements that can be performed without hazardous for environment chemical preparation of samples.
Fluorescence photos of selected food samples
We developed new fast and environment friendly (the only chemical reagent is pure water) method to routine evaluation of the TAC of food samples. The data obtained from fluorescence photos of food is transferred (using mathematical model) to the information of TAC. The method was developed to express TAC as the ORAC value (ang. oxygen radical antioxidant capacity), that is directly recommended for food commodities. We successfully applied the method to evaluate TAC of coffee, herbs and tomato paste as they are food commodities reach in antioxidants and known worldwide.
Except of being environment friendly the method is cheap and can be used on-line during the food production process, thus it can be used in routine analysis of food commodities. Moreover, we hope it will be one of the reasons to introduce the TAC values onto products labels next to the fat or protein content.
Results of our studies are published in:
J. Orzel, I. Stanimirova, B. Czarnik-Matusewicz, M. Daszykowski, Prediction of hydrophilic antioxidant capacity of tomato pastes from the IR and fluorescence excitation-emission spectra of extracts and intact samples, Talanta, 138 (2015) 64–70; IF=3.511
J. Orzel, M. Daszykowski, A rapid validation of the antioxidant capacity of food commodities based on their fluorescence excitation emission spectra as applicable to coffee and peppermint extracts, Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems, 137 (2014) 74-81; IF=2.381
J. Orzel, I. Stanimirova, B. Czarnik-Matusewicz, M. Daszykowski, Prediction of hydrophilic antioxidant capacity of tomato pastes from the IR and fluorescence excitation-emission spectra of extracts and intact samples, Talanta, 138 (2015) 64–70; IF=3.511
Results obtained within the framework of this project were also presented during several scientific conferences (see enclosed files).
If you have any questions you can contact us at: joanna.orzel@us.edu.pl
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