Harnessing luminescent techniques to monitor food quality and stability, map food structures, and unravel food interactions

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Providing affordable, nutritious, and safe foods to a continuously growing population can be met by reducing food waste and designing foods with enhanced stability and functionality. These strategies require novel, sensitive, specific, and non-invasive analytical techniques that allow monitoring food stability in real time to minimize food waste and exploring undisturbed food matrices to understand components interactions and processes that enhance or deter food deterioration. In the long term, the research program proposed by Dr. Corradini seeks to expand the use of noninvasive analytical techniques, particularly based on luminescence spectroscopy, for monitoring and understanding food quality during production, distribution, and storage. The short-term activities of this program will address the following questions to: 1. Advance real-time monitoring of a product's shelf life: 1.1. How can we optimize data acquisition and analysis of a food's fluorescence fingerprint so it can accurately report on remaining shelf-life? How product variability and environmental conditions will affect the accuracy of this estimations? 1.2. Which edible fluorophores can be effectively embedded (or operationalized in sensors) in food packaging to accurately report on the remaining shelf life or integrity of the product in real time? 2. Understand the contribution of the food matrix to shelf-life: 2.1. How luminescent techniques with spatial resolution, such as fluorescence lifetime microscopy, can we increase our knowledge on food microstructure and its dynamic nature by understanding the role of components distribution, physical state, and interactions within a food matrix? 2.2. How can food microstructure and its dynamic nature be monitored based on the photophysical properties of luminescent food components with environmental sensitivity in an undisturbed matrix? The ultimate technological aim of this work is the development (i) food monitoring techniques that will facilitate reporting the remaining shelf-life of food products (initially in  produced-based food  with the potential of expansion to other products) and (ii) analytical techniques that can facilitate the understanding of the relationships between food structure and food stability.