Food Quality Jets Into the Future

Dr. Bailey’s company has long recognized the need for automation, he says. With the introduction in 1992 of VIDAS, the first automated pathogen detection system, followed by the 2006 launch of TEMPO, the first automated enumeration system for quality indicators, the company is committed to providing the food industry with high quality, user-friendly laboratory tools to help standardize microbiology testing and enhance food company efficiencies, he says.

VIDAS provides a range of rapid pathogen detection assays with next day and 48-hour results. The latest parameter now available on the VIDAS platform incorporates a new technology that uses phage recombinant proteins for the detection of E. coli O157:H7 and provides results in less than seven hours for some samples.

“Automation is the key to the food lab of the future,” Dr. Bailey says. “Every step that can be automated increases the quality of the subsequent data by reducing the chance for laboratory error. And automation allows data to be instantly uploaded through laboratory information management systems and [makes it] immediately assessable by lab managers from a central location, allowing more informed and efficient decisions to be made of product release and disposition.”

Critical Mass Into the Future

Mass spectrometry (MS) is, of course, an important tool in today’s food lab; in the future, all state-of-the-art food labs will need the latest MS tools to identify antibiotics and pesticides in raw materials, says Jerry Zweigenbaum, PhD, market development specialist for LC (liquid chromatography)/MS for Agilent Technologies, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). “Inductively coupled plasma MS will be needed to detect trace levels of metals in ingredients,” he says.

MS has several food-related applications, including identifying unknown compounds by the mass of the compound molecules or their fragments, determining the structure of a compound by observing its fragmentation, quantifying the amount of a compound in a sample, and determining other physical, chemical, or even biological properties of compounds.

Just last year, Agilent introduced the Agilent 6220 Accurate-Mass time-of-flight (TOF) and 6520 Accurate-Mass quadrupole TOF LC/MS systems, which deliver mass accuracy, mass resolution, sensitivity, and speed for proteomics, metabolomics, product degradation, and other complex experiments.

“The changing environment and the world of natural toxins generated by fungi also demand advanced analytical capabilities,” Dr. Zweigenbaum says. “Food labs will need to be equipped to conduct general and specific analyses for compounds you expect and those you don’t expect.”

VICAM (Watertown, Mass.) develops rapid tests—approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Association of Analytical Communities—for mycotoxins and foodborne pathogens. Just a few months ago, the company launched Myco6in1 LC/MS/MS, a first-of-its-kind test kit that simultaneously determines multiple mycotoxins from a single sample extraction.

“Myco6in1 is the most advanced LC/MS multi-analyte column on the market,” says Stephen Powers, PhD, VICAM’s director of research and development. “It can be used to identify and measure the quantity of more than 12 species of aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, fumonisins, deoxynivalenol, zearalenone, and tricothecenes. The kit has already been validated for mycotoxin analysis in corn, and research is in progress by VICAM and collaborators from government and industry to optimize procedures for testing other agricultural matrixes.”

Last year, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (Waltham, Mass.) introduced its Exactive Benchtop LC/MS system, which uses Orbitrap technology to analyze complex samples containing pesticides, metabolites, and other target compounds.

In the future, Orbitrap technology will be used in food labs, accompanied by faster sample preparation technologies such as online TurboFlow LC/MS, says Dipankar Ghosh, PhD, the company’s global strategic marketing manager for environmental and food safety.

“Exactive is an easy-to-use benchtop system combining premium performance with a simple, intuitive interface, resulting in an LC/MS system that’s smaller [and] faster, as well as affordable for virtually any lab,” Dr. Ghosh says. He adds that the system provides sub-parts per million mass accuracies at resolutions of up to 100,000. “The instrument is very easy to operate, and its performance characteristics are ideally suited for screening applications.”

Global Drivers

The global nature of the food industry and the regulatory environment will continue to require global solutions for food safety and quality, says Brooke Schwartz, senior director of food and environmental testing for Applied Biosystems, Inc. (Foster City, Calif.), a life sciences company that has installed 220,000 laboratory instruments in 30,000 labs spanning 100 countries.