New method detects food fillers

A new method uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to detect food adulteration, specifically whether fillers like vegetable oil have been added to food products.

The scientists were motivated by a need to help regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with detection of adulterated food products that are products in which certain ingredients are missing or replaced.

“Food adulteration leads to a product that is cheaper to produce but is sold as the original product,” says scientist Colleen Ray of the University of Missouri department of chemistry. “This results in consumers buying a product that is not what they expected and is often inferior to the unadulterated version. Therefore, we wanted to explore the authenticity of these products.”

Ray compares the use of NMR spectroscopy with MRI.

“When medical professionals use an MRI to gauge the severity of a torn ligament or to follow a cancerous tumor, they are just using NMR spectroscopy,” she says. “The main difference is that they create pictures from the data, and we use the data to figure out the structure of molecules.”

NMR spectroscopy uses a magnet and radio waves to determine the content and purity of different substances and has been used before with other food products like honey, olive oil, and wine, says C. Michael Greenlief, director of the University of Missouri Proteomics Center and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility and corresponding author of the study.

“The analysis of food products with NMR spectroscopy is a powerful tool for the detection of adulteration,” says Greenlief, a professor of chemistry. “It is ideal for analyses of this type due to a high sample throughout, the ability to discriminate based on structural differences of metabolites with similar masses, and the ability to examine samples in either their native state or with little sample preparation.”

In the study, the scientists created and tested a method to identify vegetable oil adulterants in hard cheese products. They discovered 29% of 52 samples of various non-refrigerated grated parmesan cheese were adulterated with palm oil, a type of vegetable oil. They also note the labels of the adulterated samples did not declare palm oil as an ingredient on their labels.

“Genuine cheeses were found to have a very consistent lipid profile from sample to sample, improving the power of this approach to detect vegetable oil adulteration,” Ray says. “Palm oil itself is a clever adulterant owing to its semi-solid state at room temperature, similar color to cheese, and low price compared to cheese. However, this study is strictly limited to the lipid profile of these products, and no attempts were made to quantify any fillers aside from palm oil.”

The FDA characterizes intentional food adulteration done for financial reasons as “economically motivated adulteration” or “food fraud.” A scientist at the FDA has also expressed interest in learning more about the team’s process to help detect adulteration in food products.

The work appears in the journal Molecules. Other coauthors are from the University of Missouri and Sweetwater Science Laboratories.

Source: University of Missouri

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Were more galaxies born earlier than we thought?

Astronomers suggest more galaxies formed in the early universe than previously thought.

In their new study, the researchers discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.

“…we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation.”

The finding gets the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe—about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, says Haojing Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study.

The researchers used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations.

“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan says. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”

In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” Yan says the concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe—like galaxies—by looking at how the colors change in the waves of light that they emit.

“If a light-emitting source is moving toward us, the light is being ‘squeezed,’ and that shorter wavelength is represented by blue light, or blueshift,” Yan says. “But if that source [of light] is moving away from us, the light it produces is being ‘stretched,’ and changes to a longer wavelength that is represented by red light, or redshift.”

Yan says Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the late 1920s that our universe is ever-expanding is key to understanding how redshifts are used in astronomy.

“Hubble confirmed that galaxies external to our Milky Way galaxy are moving away from us, and the more distant they are, the faster they are moving away,” Yan says. “This relates to redshifts through the notion of distances—the higher the redshift an object is at, such as a galaxy, the further away it is from us.”

Therefore, Yan says the search for galaxies at very high redshifts gives astronomers a way to construct the early history of the universe.

“The speed of light is finite, so it takes time for light to travel over a distance to reach us,” Yan says. “For example, when we look at the sun, we aren’t looking at it what it looks like in the present, but rather what it looked like some eight minutes ago. That’s because that’s how long it takes for the sun’s radiation to reach us. So, when we are looking at galaxies which are very far away, we are looking at their images from a long time ago.”

Using this concept, Yan’s team analyzed the infrared light captured by the JWST to identify the galaxies.

“The higher the redshift a galaxy is at, the longer it takes for the light to reach us, so a higher redshift corresponds to an earlier view of the universe,” Yan says. “Therefore, by looking at galaxies at higher redshifts, we are getting earlier snapshots of what the universe looked like a long time ago.”

The JWST was critical to this discovery because objects in space like galaxies that are located at high redshifts—11 and above—can only be detected by infrared light, according to Yan. This is beyond what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can detect because the Hubble telescope only sees from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

“JWST, the most powerful infrared telescope, has the sensitivity and resolution for the job,” Yan says. “Up until these first JWST data sets were released [in mid-July 2022], most astronomers believed that the universe should have very few galaxies beyond redshift 11. At the very least, our results challenge this view. I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe. After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as JWST continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Additional coauthors are from the University of Missouri, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy and National Astronomical Observatories of China.

Source: University of Missouri

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