The overall goal of this program is the proposal of advanced analytical strategies to identify situations that might affect negatively on the food quality and safety, and whose subsequent implementation provide the basis for effective technologies in order to improve the food quality and safety, particularly those formulated with functional ingredients. Specifically, the proposal will deepen in the research on mitigating of the formation of potentially harmful substances generated during the food processing, the innovation in the production of active packaging, the authenticity ensuring, the search for new bioactive substances with beneficial effects on health or the development of foods rich in bioactive species and the determination of toxic compounds of different nature. This will imply to have the necessary tools to carry out the evaluation of the quality and safety of food from various origins and under different processed, as well as, for the biological evaluation of new substances, both those with possible beneficial effects on health as those potentially harmful. These tools will be developed and implemented throughout the program to ensure the compliance of its objectives, since the assessment of risk or benefit involves its characterization. In the development of these objectives will collaborate with various national and European institutions in order to validate the developed methodologies and make them available to the scientific community and the food industry. Furthermore, they can be applied to the assessment of the consumer exposure in those cases in which the program requires it. The proposal of advanced strategies for the detection of situations and processes that can adversely affect on the food quality and safety, as well as, the implementation of actions aimed at improvement will have the support and participation of a good number of companies in the sector.
The end result of this program will result in the development of a set of advanced technologies for the improvement and evaluation of the quality and safety of foods that will have a significant impact at level of the Community of Madrid, national and international and they will be transferred to the Agencies for Food Safety and other related government agencies and to the food industry. The successes obtained by the constituent groups of the program in the technology programs 2005 and 2009 of the Community of Madrid (ANALISYC and ANALISYC-II) predict the success of the current proposal.
In order to achieve this overall goal, there has been raised six basic objectives and one transversal objective which affects in the first six.
BASIC OBJECTIVES
They aim to propose advanced strategies for the improvement and control of food quality and safety.
OBJETIVE 1: Advanced strategies for evaluating the safety of foods: i) regulated and emerging contaminants, including nanoparticles; ii) toxic compounds generated during food processing.
OBJETIVE 2: Advanced strategies for evaluating the quality of foods: i) natural bioactive components; ii) food ingredients.
OBJETIVE 3: Proposal of new markers of food quality and safety: i) detection of food adulterations and food authentication; ii) quality of processed foods; iii) biomarkers of consumer exposure to toxic compounds from the diet.
OBJETIVE 4: Search of new sources of bioactive substances or extracts and evaluation of their biological activity/capacity: i) bioactive peptides; ii) bioactive carbohydrates and terpenes; iii) bioactive species of Zn, Se and I; iv) polyphenols; v) bioactive lipids.
OBJETIVE 5: Strategies for improving the quality of food: i) minimizing of variations in the organoleptic and textural properties caused by the chemical changes of processed foods; ii) innovation in obtaining active packaging; iii) addition of new bioactive substances with beneficial effects on health; iv) development of foods rich in bioactive species.
OBJETIVE 6: Strategies for improving food safety: i) evaluation of processes that generate chemical compounds affecting food safety (effect of the package, sources of contamination, food processing); ii) study of bioaccumulation, bioavailability and potential toxicity of emerging contaminants and compounds generated in the thermal processing of food; iii) new strategies to mitigate the formation of undesirable substances generated during food processing.
TRANSVERSAL OBJETIVE
Within this objective, it is claim to consolidate and increase the analytical platform created in earlier programs (ANALISYC and ANALISYC-II) and develop advanced chemometric methodologies useful for all groups, and that affect on the six basic objectives.
OBJETIVE 7: Establishment of a common analytical platform that integrates instrumental techniques and chemometric methodologies of application for the whole consortium.