Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years food supplement market increased constantly, including slimming products and against obesity. The case of rasberry ketone (RK) is here reported. HPTLC and HPLC-DAD analyses on a marketed product containing raspberry juice evidenced an abnormal quantity of RK, not in accordance with the juice natural content. The reported data confirm the need of adequate controls on marketed food supplements and the necessity of a complete adherence between labelling and real constitution of the product.

Sea bass represents one of the main fish products in the market. Most of it comes from farming and is bred in different conditons with respect to the wild fish. Differences may thus be expected. In this study, a proteomic profile of farmed and wild sea bass samples was performed, employing a fractionation strategy where peptide samples were first separated by 2D chromatography. The peptides were finally analyzed by shotgun proteomics workflow combined to tandem MS.

We exploit prediction capabilities of the moving-boundary model for food isothermal drying proposed in Adrover et al. (2019). We apply the model to two different sets of literature experimental data resulting from the air-drying process of eggplant cylinders (two-dimensional problem) and potatoes slices (three-dimensional problem). These two food materials, both exhibiting non-ideal shrinkage, are characterized by very different “calibration curves“ i.e. different behaviours of volume reduction V/V0as a function of the rescaled moisture content X/X0.

The knowledge of changes in the properties of foods that occur with processing is needed for designing better drying methods that preserve desirable characteristics and minimize/eliminate undesirable ones. To this aim, this study analysed the effect of convective drying at 45–55 °C on physicochemical properties of pear. The drying kinetics, shrinkage and SEM images were evaluated. Portable-NMR was used to determine the drying moisture profile of pears and thickness reduction.

A variety of extraction methodologies were applied to chinotto (Citrus myrtifolia) fruits from Sicily, along with sensory and chemical analyses. By gas chromatographic techniques, either in monodimensional (GC-FID, GC–MS) or in multidimensional (MDGC) fashion, it was established how the isolation procedure affected the volatile fingerprint of such fruit. In general, limonene, linalyl acetate, myrcene, β-pinene, α-pinene, (E)-β-ocimene, linalool and geranyl acetate resulted to be the predominant volatiles.