Every year, the Catalan Nutrition Center (CCNIEC) of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) in Catalonia (Spain) recognizes the best doctoral theses’ in the field of food science and nutrition. In the current edition, our very own Beatriz Quintanilla Casas has been awarded the CCNIEC-Eroski Foundation 2022 Prize for her doctoral thesis, titled “Development of innovative analytical techniques for olive oil authentication and quality assessment”.

In all honesty, this is really something that happened on our duty. The work was carried out within the Lipids and bioactive compounds research group at the department of Nutrition, Food Science and Gastronomy of University of Barcelona (Spain). But we are happy and proud regardless!

Link to the CCNIEC website: https://www.ccniec.cat/premis-ccniec/premi-tesi-doctoral/#toggle-id-1

Link to the thesis or at least the abstract: http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/189681

We are extremely happy and proud to announce our first official version of the PARADISe software. It transforms untargeted GC-MS data from large sample sets into peak tables in a very simple, robust and reproducible manner. And it is very easy to use. You can find it at

PARADISe

where you can also find information on how to use the software in the form of a tutorial and a little instruction video.

Please try it and let us know what you think. We are very happy for all the support especially from Arla and the Danish Dairy Research Foundation who has made this work possible.

History. PARADISe has been in the making for more than a decade and has been developed with generous funding from numerous companies and agencies. Here is a list of some of the most important contributors to the software:

Jesper Løve Hinrich

Paul Schneide

Huiwen Yu

Giacomo Baccolo

Beatriz Quintanilla-Casas

Dillen Augustijn

Anne Bech Risum

Lea Johnsen

Peter Bæk Skou

Bekzod Khakimov

José Manuel Amigo

Maja Kamstrup-Nielsen

Thomas Skov

Giorgio Tomasi

Rasmus Bro

If you do, you will have some pretty big shoes to fill because the position of the professorate of Age Smilde is now posted. You can find the details here.

For our Christmas lunch, we ran a large experiment on the effect of storage time of the mix of flour and honey used for cooking traditional Danish ginger bread hearts. Turns out, it is important.

Here is Jesper Løve Hinrich working on the hearts.

Have you ever struggled with building complex decision trees with classification models? It can be very time consuming and you often are not sure you achieved optimal results. We have automated the process with the code AHIMBU that you can find here. You can read the paper about this in Journal of Chemometrics.

Here is (most of) the chemometrics group meeting up to discuss how we can best create synergy between our many projects on a cold November day in 2022

On November 11, 2022, Margherita Tonolini very successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Process Analytical Technology in whey processing: on-line selective protein quantification”.

Here she is with the two supervisors Søren Balling Engelsen and Frans van den Berg. And with two of the committee members, Marina Cocchi and Morten Lykkegaard Christensen.

Want to read the thesis? You can find it here.

The aim of this project is to create a concept design for a novel fluorescence-based instrument for the objective assessment of wine quality. This will be done to meet the demand from winemakers for a fast, easy-to-use measurement of the chemicals important for the sensorial attributes of wine. The project will achieve this by establishing an objective rapid method for determining low concentration wine quality parameters using fluorescence spectroscopy and advanced multivariate data modeling.

The PhD is a so-called industrial PhD – a collaboration between FOSS and Åsmund Rinnan. But more importantly, the PhD student is Helene Halberg which you should contact for more information.

Tiffany Patra defended her thesis entitled:

The Physicochemical Stability of Oat-based Drinks – with an Emphasis on Rapid Spectroscopy and LF-NMR Characterisation

The oat-based drink is a popular dairy alternative, and the product is considered healthy due to the presence of β-glucan dietary fibers. However, natural plant-based drinks without additives have less physical stability than cow’s milk. Many chemical and physical factors affect product stability. The measurements of these parameters are often laborious, lengthy, or change the food matrix, which introduces bias. Spectroscopy and low-field NMR methods have the benefit of providing rapid and in-situ measurements that give multivariate information. The use of the proper chemometrics technique is crucial for interpreting these datasets. This thesis aims to investigate the various stability profile in oat-based drinks using spectroscopic and low-field NMR methods

You can download the thesis at our thesis repository (May 2022).

Data comes from a MSc thesis project and consists of 216 samples of granules in glass vials analysed by NIR. A downscaled dry granulation process was developed during the project and designed such that three quality attributes variances could be controlled:

• Model API concentration (Bovine Serum Albumin, BSA)
  • Six levels ranging from 2% to 15% w/w
• Particle size
  • Three levels, controlled by material mass used during compaction (1 g, 1.5 g and 2 g).
• Moisture content
  • Four levels, controlled by the use of desiccators with relative humidity ranging from 11% to 62%.

Triplicates were produced of each attribute combination. Each sample was measured three times using a Bruker MPA II NIR equipment with resolution 8 cm^-1, 64 scans and in the spectral range 11550 cm^-1 to 3950 cm^-1 for each measurement. The samples were measured before and after moisturization. Download the data here.