signature=9072fdce05d2274ff4c1882d408ebeef,494 Early Career Awardee: Using VOC Signatures to Charact...

Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometry (REIMS) is a relatively new technology that is emerging in many areas of science, including in human medicine and biological sciences. Recently published research has shown that REIMS can identify animal tissue of differing anatomical origin, breed, and species with considerable accuracy. REIMS has potential to be developed to characterize and differentiate flavor and identify off-flavors in meat, as well as provide information about production history, age, and color. Recently, a proof of concept was demonstrated for differentiating sheep meat flavor attributes using mass spectrometry. Thus, the opportunity exists to identify and instrument technology that demonstrates the capacity to perform the task of reducing the incidence of consumers in the production environment. REIMS-based tissue analysis generally takes only a few seconds and can provide histological tissue identification with 90−98% correct classification performance (Balog et al., 2013). Using time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry, REIMS profiling provides in situ, real-time molecularly-resolved information by ionizing biological samples in real-time without any sample preparation. Waters Corp. (Wilmslow, UK) has developed this technology as REIMS with “iKnife” coupled to a Xevo G2-S quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (Waters Corp., Wilmslow, UK). This simple system utilizes a handheld sampling device and can perform analysis of tissue in 2 seconds. The primary advantage of this technology is that is requires no sample preparation or chromatography to achieve broad molecular profiling of tissue samples. With respect to the meat industry, for the first time, this technology would potentially allow for meat quality attributes such as flavor profile and meat tenderness to be predicted and characterized in real time from carcass assessment. Recent research at Colorado State University demonstrated that REIMS effectively segregated sheep meat samples based on flavor intensity. In this experiment, fat and lean tissue from the exterior of individual lamb legs determined to have “mild” or “bold” lamb flavor by a trained sensory panel, were evaluated using iKnife technology. In a blind analysis, the technology segregated mild and bold lamb samples with 100 % accuracy.

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