Quality Standard and Food Safety for Agro-food

1. Agro-food quality and safety via arbitration inspection and/or rapid assay
The team for quality and safety has focused on developing techniques for assuring agro-food quality and safety based on basic and applied research. The research fields include: 1) HPLC/GC-MS based arbitration inspection techniques for various agro-food products; 2) immunoassay-based rapid assay for detecting biotoxins and pesticides; and 3) instruments for quick and cheap testing of biotoxins and pesticides. In addition, the team has also made efforts in investigating occurrence, distribution, accumulation, metabolic mechanism of biotoxins in agricultural products and developing integrated management approaches for contaminants.

2. Risk assessment for quality and safety of oilseed products
The team is to develop database of information of occurrence, impact, influencing factors related to contamination of biotoxins, pesticides, heavy metals and residues of anti-nutritional factors in oilseed products in China. By continuous accumulation of related information, monitoring and warning system of risk factors in oilseed products in the production and food chain will be improved which can lead to an enhanced production system and food safety.

3. Authenticity and adulteration detection of edible vegetable oils
The team is also working on developing qualified methods for identifying authenticity for detecting adulteration of edible vegetable oils based on metabolites and external/internal markers. The technical strategies include chromatography-mass spectrometry based confirmation method and immunochemistry based detection method, which can provide key support for government supervision for authenticity of edible oils in markets.