Dear all,
recently I was confronted with the statement that "rare sugars" can be used to identify food fraud or the use of enzymatic food treatment.
Initially, I was surprised to learn, that the term "rare sugars" is a known terminus technicus. Literature tells about some analytical methods - mostly based on liquid chromatography - to analyze some (psicose, tagatose to name the two most commonly mentioned).
What I would like to know is the following:
Is there any additional indication for an increased interest in such components?
Any hint and suggestion would be highly welcome.
Thank you very much in advance,
Detlef.
I have my doubts. Most HPLC methods are for simple sugars like glucose, fructose, and maltose... Many scientists even have a hard time identifying fraudulent honey much less a complex matrix like a food.
You also need to identify this hypothetical 'rare sugar' and in what food matrix!
Bruce Neagle , many thanks for your message. True, very much so. Just to add to it: Psicose already is being used as a marker in honey, if I am not mistaken. However (chromatographer speaking) they use NMR.
Thanks again.
True. But, but people who make a 'fraudulent' anything know they are in an 'arms race' with scientists.
Yes! The science to detect fraud is to understand fraud....
not to say:
The science to detect fraud is to understand the science of fraud.
Welcome to the ranks!
Cheers,
Detlef.
I used HILIC-HPLC-CAD, with a Shodex VG-50 column to separate many different sugars in honey samples from around the world (mono-saccharides up to tetrasaccharides I believe). This data, combined with principal component analysis would work very well as far as determining authenticity. I did some similar work with extra-virgin olive oils, where HPLC-CAD and PCA based on triglyceride patterns, could correlate two Greek EVOOs to 95% out of a collection of 43 different Californian EVOOs.
Honey adulteration is a relatively hot area in food chemistry. As you point out, there are multiple published methods using NMR. I have done some work using HPLC-MS/MS, which I find to be vastly superior to the NMR methods (but slower, obviously) both in adulterated honey as well as adulterated aloe vera products, mostly concentrating on mannose. I can definitely see the advantage of looking for the rare sugars as adulterant markers (lower concentrations indicates adulteration, for example).
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