Application of Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy for the Assessment of Wine Spoilage Indicators: A Feasibility Study.

Wine aroma is one of the most frequently used and explored quality indicators. Typically, its assessment involves estimating the volatile composition of wine or highly trained assessors conducting sensory analysis. However, current methodologies rely on slow, expensive and complicated analytical procedures. Additionally, sensory evaluation is inherently subjective in nature. Therefore, the aim of this work is to verify the feasibility of using FTIR spectroscopy as a fast and easy methodology for the early detection of some of the most common off-odors in wines. FTIR spectroscopy was combined with partial least squares (PLS) regression for the simultaneous measurement of isoamyl alcohol, isobutanol, 1-hexanol, butyric acid, isobutyric acid, decanoic acid, ethyl acetate, furfural and acetoin. The precision and accuracy of developed calibration models (R2P > 0.90, range error ratio > 12.1 and RPD > 3.1) proved the ability of the proposed methodology to quantify the aforementioned compounds.

Thawing as a critical pre-analytical step in the lipidomic profiling of plasma samples: New standardized protocol.

Lipid profiling is a promising tool for the discovery and subsequent identification of biomarkers associated with various diseases. However, data quality is quite dependent on the pre-analytical methods employed. To date, potential confounding factors that may affect lipid metabolite levels after the thawing of plasma for biomarker exploration studies have not been thoroughly evaluated. In this study, by means of experimental design methodology, we performed the first in-depth examination of the ways in which thawing conditions affect lipid metabolite levels. After the optimization stage, we concluded that temperature, sample volume and the thawing method were the determining factors that had to be exhaustively controlled in the thawing process to ensure the quality of biomarker discovery. Best thawing conditions were found to be: 4 °C, with 0.25 mL of human plasma and ultrasound (US) thawing. The new US proposed thawing method was quicker than the other methods we studied, allowed more features to be identified and increased the signal of the lipids. In view of its speed, efficiency and detectability, the US thawing method appears to be a simple, economical method for the thawing of plasma samples, which could easily be applied in clinical laboratories before lipid profiling studies.

Plasma lipidomic profiling method based on ultrasound extraction and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.

Lipidomics is an emerging field in biomedical research that includes the analysis of all the lipids present in complex biological samples. To evaluate the chemical and biological diversity of lipids, lipid extraction is usually the first step toward lipidomics analysis. Nevertheless, sample preparation is still a time-consuming and error prone analytical step. Therefore, the development of simple and robust methods suitable for high-throughput lipid analysis is of great interest. This study presents a new method for exhaustive lipid fingerprinting of human blood plasma samples based on the employment of methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) and ultrasound (US) energy combined with liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-ESIqToF-MS). First, the MTBE-US extraction step was optimized by means of experimental design methodology. After the optimization step, a comparative study was performed to assess the suitability of the proposed method. The new method allowed extraction time to be reduced to half, in comparison with previously reported methods. The proposed method also allowed increasing extraction repeatability (with RSDs below 5.55%) and efficiency (recoveries higher than 70% were obtained for all lipids evaluated). Moreover, the new proposed method enables more than 800 different features to be detected. Thus, the overall number of lipids identified with the databases for this novel extraction method (352) was the highest of the evaluated methods. The efficiency, precision, and feature detection capacity of the proposed method confirmed its suitability for the evaluation of the lipid profile of human blood plasma samples. Moreover, taking into account its simplicity, low time consumption, and compatibility with automation, the new proposed method could be a suitable alternative to previously reported methods for use in laboratories for comprehensive lipidomic profiling.

Optimisation of a sensitive method based on ultrasound-assisted emulsification-microextraction for the simultaneous determination of haloanisoles and volatile phenols in wine.

In this study, an ultrasound-assisted emulsification-microextraction (USAEME) has been optimised for the sensitive determination of haloanisoles (2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), 2,3,4,6-tetrachloroanisole (TeCA), 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA) and pentachloroanisole (PCA)) and volatile phenols (4-ethylphenol (4-EP), 4-ethylguaiacol (4-EG), 4-vinylphenol (4-VP) and 4-vinylguaiacol (4-VG)) in wine using gas chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS). Optimisation of USAEME method was performed by evaluating the different parameters that influence the recovery of the analytes in the extract. Firstly, extraction solvent was selected. Subsequently its volume, the ionic strength and the time and temperature at which the extraction must be performed were simultaneously evaluated by means of experimental design methodology. After optimisation step, the analytical characteristics of the method were evaluated. Satisfactory linearity (with correlation coefficients over 0.989), repeatability (below 11.5%) and inter-day precision (below 11.7%) were obtained for all target analytes. For all the studied compounds, detection limits obtained were similar or even lower than previously reported. In addition, the developed method was successfully applied to the analysis of wine samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that USAEME has been applied to simultaneously determine the compounds responsible for cork taint and Brett character in wine.

Development of an ultrasound-assisted emulsification-microextraction method for the determination of the main compounds causing cork taint in wines.

In this work, an ultrasound-assisted emulsification-microextraction method has been optimised for the determination in wine of haloanisoles (2,4,6-trichloranisole (TCA), 2,3,4,6-tetrachloroanisole (TeCA), 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA) and pentachloranisole (PCA)) responsible for the so-called cork taint. Their halophenolic precursors (2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP), 2,3,4,6-tetrachlorophenol (TeCP), 2,4,6-tribromophenol (TBP) and pentachlorophenol (PCP)) have also been simultaneously determined. For this purpose, parameters affecting the USAEME-derivatisation procedure were exhaustively investigated. Firstly, extraction solvent, basic conditions and extraction time were selected to, subsequently, employ experimental design methodology for the simultaneous optimisation of the volumes of acetic anhydride and extraction solvent, temperature and ionic strength conditions. Once optimised, the evaluation of the analytical performance of the method confirmed its suitability for the determination of the studied compounds in wines. The proposed method showed satisfactory linearity (correlation coefficients over 0.981), repeatability (below 10.9%) and inter-day precision (below 11.0%). Detection limits obtained were similar or even lower than previously reported. In addition, the proposed method was successfully applied to the analysis of real samples. To our knowledge, this is the first time that USAME method has been optimised for the simultaneous determination of haloanisoles and halophenols in wine.

Headspace solid-phase microextraction for direct determination of volatile phenols in cider.

A headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled to gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) method was optimised and validated for the determination of 4-ethylguaiacol, 4-ethylphenol, 4-vinylguaiacol and 4-vinylphenol, involved in the presence of Brett character, in ciders. The influence of different parameters on extraction efficiency (fibre coating, salt addition, exposure time, extraction temperature and sample volume/total volume ratio) was evaluated. Divinylbenzene/carboxen/PDMS was selected as extraction fibre and the other optimised parameters were as follows: 10 mL of cider, temperature 70 degrees C, extraction time 60 min and addition of 0.4 g/mL of NaCl. The proposed method showed satisfactory linearity. The detection limits obtained were 0.01 microg/L for 4-ethylguaiacol, 0.02 microg/L for 4-ethylphenol, 0.08 microg/L for 4-vinylguaiacol and 0.03 microg/L for 4-vinylphenol. These detection limits were lower than those obtained in previous studies on the determination of volatile phenols in other alcoholic beverages. Good recoveries of over 95% were observed for all compounds, and the repeatability obtained was considered acceptable, ranging between 4 and 10%. To demonstrate the feasibility of the procedure, the method was applied to the analysis of commercial ciders. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the headspace solid-phase microextraction procedure has been optimised to determine specifically the Brett character responsible compounds in cider.

Classification of archaeological sherds across the southeast United States based on variable selection from compositional fingerprints.

The transfer of advances in chemometrics into archaeometric research opens a wide range of new application possibilities in this rapidly developing field. The present research represents a feasibility study aimed at showing how the huge potential that multivariate analysis and feature selection techniques have demonstrated for classification purposes can be extrapolated to archaeological provenance studies, thus pursuing an enhancement of the resulting classification performance. The classification problem studied here was related to the discrimination of pottery sherds from different sources across the southeast of the United States from their compositional fingerprints. The sample elemental concentrations were analyzed using the stepwise linear discriminant analysis (SLDA) method, thus simultaneously performing feature selection and classification. Several approaches, more or less restrictive according to the geographical scope and the number of considered classes, were explored, following a hierarchical classification approach. In contrast to previous studies on the same data set, the reliable and unequivocal classification strategy presented here did not merely focus on developing a large-scale classification into broad geographical areas, but finer classifications were also successively obtained until samples were assigned into individual regions. The great discrimination ability and effectiveness of the classification methodology proposed are promising and encourage its application to new samples of unknown provenance and the feasibility of using similar approaches in other archaeological studies. The high quality results obtained were even more remarkable considering the relatively small number of discriminant variables selected in each case by the stepwise procedure.