From developing flavour profiles to uncovering food adulteration, Nick Birse discusses the work of the ASSET Technology Centre
Nick Birse is a lecturer in mass spectrometry at the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS) and the School of Biological Sciences in Queen’s University, Belfast. He speaks to us about the ASSET Technology Centre, a leading analytical chemistry and mass spectrometry research hub within the IGFS, that hosts the National Measurement Laboratory’s Centre for Excellence in Agriculture and Food Integrity.
“The ASSET Technology Centre, which stands for assured, safe and traceable, was established by Professor Chris Elliott a decade ago when he founded the IGFS. It was inspired by incidents such as the dioxin scandal that occurred in the pig industry in Ireland, the horsemeat scandal in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands, and the melamine-in-milk scandal in China.
Inside the lab
The laboratory was established to provide a variety of experts to support the local agricultural sector in Northern Ireland. “Agriculture is such a large and important part of the economies of Northern Ireland and Ireland that we want to ensure we have the skills and expertise on site, not just to undertake product development testing for companies, but also to train the next generation of food scientists and analysts that will be employed in the sector,” says Nick.
The laboratory has a dual structure with a two-tier testing approach, Nick explains. “We’ve got a spectroscopy side with a variety of handheld, portable instrumentation: near infrared, mid infrared, ultraviolet, and elemental spectroscopy, as well as larger bench-top instruments that are very sensitive but work better in a laboratory environment.”
Queen’s University has worked with a spin-out company, Bia Analytical, to develop handheld devices that use advanced computer modelling technology. “The data is transferred through Bluetooth onto your smartphone and transferred up to the cloud, where it’s processed. The result is then sent back to the smartphone so the user can see in real time if the product is passing or failing testing.
“This computer modelling technology can achieve a wide variety, from assessing quality to checking the flavour or taste characteristics producers are looking for, through to identifying for contamination or adulteration,” Nick explains.
The advantage of the spectroscopy approach, he says, is that it moves away from genetics and DNA, meaning it can identify where non-biologic ingredients like brick dust, soil or clay have been added. “If you were to test something like a chilli powder that’s been adulterated with brick dust genetically, all that’s in there is 100% chilli, but it could be 50% brick dust. Lead chromate is put into turmeric to make it brighter. The genetic profile of the product remains unchanged, so if a genetic test is used, it will look as if it’s passed. But using the spectroscopy, there’s a difference in the chemical fingerprint, and we can see that we’ve got a problem.”
Adulteration can be caused by a variety of things from deliberate criminality such as adding clay powder to bulk out a product, to pesticide residue as a result of weather conditions. Nick elaborates: “Most pesticides are designed to break down when they’re exposed to light and ozone. In Ireland the ideal weather conditions may not occur, and the pesticide may not degrade as quickly as expected. When the product is harvested, there could be a higher level of pesticide residue than expected which can lead to illness.”
Another function of the lab is to work with industry to examine new products to ensure they have the correct levels of certain key ingredients like vitamins and minerals. “This can be food products or animal feed. We do a lot of work with the grain traders associations to ensure that new animal feeds have the correct composition.”
Elsewhere in the lab, he says, staff are working on new novel animal feeds and supplements to reduce methane emissions and improve animal health. There are ongoing trials on willow in animal feed to help the gut microbiome in sheep and cattle and cut methane emissions.
“Some of the other work that we do is consumer preference understanding. We can do all of this work to deliver new food products that are better for the environment, have lower emissions or enhanced nutrition, but if its unpalatable to consumers, particularly if it tastes worse than what is available at a lower cost, or if it just doesn’t taste pleasant, consumers won’t buy it,” he says.
Market forces
Food safety issues change depending on market demand, supply and availability. According to Nick: “For example, if it’s been a particularly poor year for grain yields, grain that’s been sitting on farm with higher levels of fungal mycotoxin contamination might make it onto the market. There might be some blending and other illegal activities to try and get it under the thresholds.”
Trending food items, often driven by cookery programmes, can also have an impact on food safety, something Nick calls the ‘Delia Smith effect’. “If organic chicken is trending, suddenly you will find that the supply starts to accommodate demand, but production hasn’t changed, so products can be mislabelled to meet demand.”
The lab can be notified of these fraudulent cases through a number of channels, from supermarkets to government agencies. Nick outlines a recent example: “There was a case recently where consumers in Scotland reported to Trading Standards that their vodka had an odour, smelling a bit like nail varnish remover. Trading Standards seized it and sent it for testing, which revealed that isopropyl alcohol was present. When they looked at the product and packaging in more detail, they could also see that it was missing laser etching on the bottle.
“A previous collaborator of ours, Roy Goodacre at the University of Liverpool, has worked on a spatially offset ramen spectroscopy system. This is a handheld device that can be placed against a bottle to indicate if there is a problem with the contents without having to open it. This is an example of where scientists can collaborate with government on quick and easy ways to test items without necessarily having to open up the packet and get an answer.”
Daily routine
A typical day for Nick involves lecturing, project management, grant writing, training and school board meetings. “Work in the lab usually starts at 8:30am or 9am. The instrument does the work rather than the person so we will have samples lined up and running automatically. “We’ll double check that anything running overnight has completed, check for errors or if there is anything to repeat. Then we start to analyse and process the data and get our next set of samples prepared. The results can steer what we do in terms of further work.”
Advances in food safety technology have meant that the volume of samples processed by the lab has increased. “We’re able to get more samples processed in a shorter period of time. If we have a grain ship arriving at Belfast Harbour and it takes us an hour to process each grain sample, it’s going to take us a long time to get representative samples from 20 or 30,000 tonnes of grain. With rapid technologies, we can now process 15 or 20 times as many samples, and this allows us to overcome representative sampling. More samples mean more data, and better quality results give us more certainty, more confidence.”
These advances help in other ways, too, he says. “We have simplified many of the techniques, and instrumentation has become more sensitive, so there isn’t as much sample clean up or pre-processing required. Consequently, the number of people involved to get samples into instruments has reduced.”
The simpler something is in terms of a test, he explains, the more robust it is. “There are fewer failure points compared with how things were done 10 or 15 years ago, so we can have more confidence in the results that we provide.”
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