Ricerc@Sapienza

Promoting and protecting the market of typical national territory’s products are fundamental from a commodity point of view. Often, high-added value foods are subjected to fraud. Chestnuts have extraordinary nutritional and organoleptic qualities and Italy is one of the biggest producers of this product. The purpose of the present study is to develop an analytical method suitable to authenticate the chestnut of Vallerano a PDO agro-food produced in Central-Italy.

Rice is a staple food in Vietnam, and the concern about rice is much greater than that for other foods. Preventing fraud against this product has become increasingly important in order to protect producers and consumers from possible economic losses. The possible adulteration of this product is done by mixing, or even replacing, high-quality rice with cheaper rice. This highlights the need for analytical methodologies suitable for its authentication. Given this scenario, the present work aims at testing a rapid and non-destructive approach to detect adulterated rice samples.

"Egg pasta" is a kind of pasta prepared by adding eggs in the dough; the color of this product is often associated to its quality, as it is proportional to the quantity of egg present in the dough. A possible adulteration on this product is represented by the addition of turmeric (not reported in the label) in the dough. The inclusion of this ingredient (which is minimal, given the strong coloring power of this spice) fraudulently accentuates the yellow color of the product, making it more attractive to the consumer.

Human skeletal muscles may undergo qualitative and quantitative, physiological and pathological changes during life. Some of these changes may be detected with imaging techniques, others with immunohystochemical and molecular analysis. Both these types of investigation are expensive, time consuming, and not readily available. Therefore, at present, a cheap, reliable, and widely applicable technique for non-invasive in vivo analysis of human muscles is lacking.

Optical spectroscopy is a powerful tool in research and industrial applications. Its properties of being rapid, non-invasive
and not destructive make it a promising technique for qualitative as well as quantitative analysis in medicine. Recent
advances in materials and fabrication techniques provided portable, performant, sensing spectrometers readily operated
by user-friendly cabled or wireless systems. We used such a system to test whether infrared spectroscopy techniques,

Recent advances in materials and fabrication techniques provided portable, performant, sensing optical spectrometers readily operated by user-friendly cabled or wireless systems. Such systems allow rapid, non-invasive, and not destructive quantitative analysis of human tissues. This proof-of-principle investigation tested whether infrared spectroscopy techniques, currently utilized in a variety of areas, could be applied in living humans to categorize muscles.