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  • QuEChERS - Fundamentals, relevant improvements, applications and future trends
    Publication . Perestrelo, Rosa; Silva, Pedro; Porto-Figueira, Priscilla; Pereira, Jorge A. M.; Silva, Catarina; Medina, Sonia; Câmara, José S.
    The Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged and Safe (QuEChERS) method is a simple and straightforward extraction technique involving an initial partitioning followed by an extract clean-up using dispersive solid-phase extraction (d-SPE). Originally, the QuEChERS approach was developed for recovering pesticide residues from fruits and vegetables, but rapidly gained popularity in the comprehensive isolation of analytes from different matrices. According to PubMed, since its development in 2003 up to November 2018, about 1360 papers have been published reporting QuEChERS as extraction method. Several papers have reported different improvements and modifications to the original QuEChERS protocol to ensure more efficient extractions of pH-dependent analytes and to minimize the degradation of labile analytes. This analytical approach shows several advantages over traditional extraction techniques, requiring low sample and solvent volumes, as well as less time for sample preparation. Furthermore, most of the published studies show that the QuEChERS protocol provides higher recovery rate and a better analytical performance than conventional extraction procedures. This review proposes an updated overview of the most recent developments and applications of QuEChERS beyond its original application to pesticides, mycotoxins, veterinary drugs and pharmaceuticals, forensic analysis, drugs of abuse and environmental contaminants. Their pros and cons will be discussed, considering the factors influencing the extraction efficiency. Whenever possible, the performance of the QuEChERS is compared to other extraction approaches. In addition to the evolution of this technique, changes and improvements to the original method are discussed.
  • Current trends and recent advances on food authenticity technologies and chemometric approaches
    Publication . Medina, Sonia; Perestrelo, Rosa; Silva, Pedro; Pereira, Jorge A. M.; Câmara, José S.
    Background: Food frauds and counterfeit products produced to obtain economic advantages have become a growing concern over the last decade. The assessment of food safety and authenticity constitute a powerful tool to mitigate this problem and protect public health. Nevertheless, the growing sophistication of fraudulent practices requires a continuous update and improvement of the analytical methodologies. Scope and approach: In this context, the advances and novel techniques and chemometric approaches reported since 2016 are discussed regarding their potential use in food authentication. This review details the main analytical techniques applied in the extraction, detection and identification of metabolites to obtain food fingerprints, emphasizing the advantages and drawbacks of each approach with practical examples. Additionally, the current legislation on food authentication has also been revised. Key findings and conclusions: GC-MS, LC- q-TOF-MS and NMR followed by PCA and PLS-DA are the most often reported analytical methodologies to discriminate between authentic and non-authentic foodstuffs using chemical fingerprints. More recently, novel and promising statistical methods with high classification power (DDSIMCA, OO-SIMCA, BPR, k-NN, among others) are being already applied. Overall, the development of nondestructive, on-siteandreal-time analyticalprocedures abletodeliverfastandunambiguous foodauthentication results will continue to be the goal driving food research.
  • Current trends on microextraction by packed sorbent – fundamentals, application fields, innovative improvements and future applications
    Publication . Pereira, Jorge A. M.; Gonçalves, João; Porto-Figueira, Priscilla; Figueira, José A.; Alves, Vera; Perestrelo, Rosa; Medina, Sonia; Câmara, José S.
    MEPS, the acronym of microextraction by packed sorbent, is a simple, fast and user- and environmen tally-friendly miniaturization of the popular solid-phase extraction technique (SPE). In fact, it has been widely shown that MEPS can easily replace SPE for most, if not all, previous applications. It can attain this with obvious gains in sample and solvent usage, which is greatly reduced without compromising the extraction efficiency. Furthermore, MEPS can be operated with semiautomatic electronic syringes, making it very reliable and versatile, particularly to handle very low and very high sample volumes. This review will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of this technique and the different MEPS architectures commer cially available in the context of the MEPS applications reported in the last five years. Additionally, innova tive improvements will be highlighted, particularly those related with new applications and recent MEPS configurations and sorbents, such as the controlled directional flow or the innovative µSPEed variant.