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

为不断增长的人口提供负担得起的、有营养的和安全的食品，可以通过减少食物浪费和设计具有增强稳定性和功能性的食品来实现。这些策略需要新颖、灵敏、特异和非侵入性的分析技术，以便实时监测食物稳定性，最大限度地减少食物浪费，并探索未受干扰的食物基质，以了解增强或阻止食物变质的成分相互作用和过程。从长远来看，Corradini博士提出的研究计划旨在扩大非侵入性分析技术的使用，特别是基于发光光谱的分析技术，以监测和了解食品在生产、分销和储存过程中的质量。该计划的短期活动将解决以下问题：1。产品保质期的先进实时监控：我们如何优化食品荧光指纹的数据采集和分析，使其能够准确地报告剩余保质期？产品可变性和环境条件将如何影响这种估计的准确性？1.2. 哪些可食用荧光团可以有效地嵌入（或在传感器中操作）在食品包装中，以实时准确地报告产品的剩余保质期或完整性？2。了解食品基质对保质期的贡献：空间分辨率的发光技术，如荧光寿命显微镜，如何通过了解食物基质中成分分布、物理状态和相互作用的作用，来增加我们对食物微观结构及其动态性质的认识？2.2. 如何在不受干扰的基质中，基于具有环境敏感性的发光食品成分的光物理特性来监测食品的微观结构及其动态性质？这项工作的最终技术目标是发展(i)食品监测技术，这将有助于报告食品的剩余保质期（最初是在生产的食品中，有可能扩展到其他产品）和（ii）分析技术，可以促进理解食品结构和食品稳定性之间的关系。

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.