Advancing Agriculture for Future Generations: A Preview

Welcome to the first part of our preview for our “Advancing Agriculture for Future Generations” content series, a joint series with LCGC International and Spectroscopy.

This series spotlights 15 pieces of content, which showcase the latest chromatographic research in agriculture. Our content is divided into three categories – news articles, interviews, and technical articles. Here, we provide you with a sneak peek about what to expect regarding our upcoming news stories.

Several studies that we covered focus on livestock, which is an important aspect of agriculture. Livestock and animal husbandry provides many essential products and services to humans. We use animals for food and for labor; as a result, it is essential that breeding livestock is done correctly and ensures the health and safety of the animals. One news story titled, “Novel Analytical Method Detects Pesticide Residues in Livestock Urine,” examines how combining liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) and QuEChERS extraction can monitor pesticide pollution in livestock breeding. We also summarize a study that explores how researchers at Agro Innovation International in France employed HS-SPME-GC–MS to characterize volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in farm effluents, presenting a simple, fast, and economical method for quantifying 177 and 77 VOCs in laboratory and field tests.

Expanding our focus on livestock, we looked at the agriculture food products that emerge from the rearing of animals, in particular dairy products. Several articles focus on dairy products. A news story titled, “Understanding Antioxidant Capacity: Insights from the Folin–Ciocalteu Assay,” covers a recent study done in Spain, explaining how the F–C assay can effectively quantify polyphenols in agricultural food products and help ensure the safety of these products for human consumption. Staying in Spain, another news story covers another study from this European country. Titled “Unveiling Phenolic Pollutants in Dairy Products: A Breakthrough Analysis,” this study used chromatographic techniques to detect the presence of phenolic pollutants in milk and dairy products. The third story on dairy products comes courtesy from Gdańsk University of Technology. In this news story, we summarize a study that uses chromatography to analyze GM3 gangliosides in human milk, elucidating their molecular distribution and dynamic changes throughout lactation. Lastly, a study out of Germany that used high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with both diode array and fluorescence detection (DAD and FLD, respectively) to measure Edam cheese for its acid-soluble whey content.

Apart from dairy products, chromatography is also used in various ways to ensure the safety and efficacy of other agricultural food products. As a result, we include a few news stories on this topic. One news story, “New Mycotoxin Detection Method: MIL-101(Cr)@Fe₃O₄ Nanocomposites Enhances Agricultural Product Safety,” covers how researchers at the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences developed a new magnetic solid-phase extraction (SPE) method using MIL-101(Cr)@Fe₃O₄ nanocomposites, enabling the efficient and simultaneous detection of multiple mycotoxins in agricultural products, potentially impacting food and feed safety standards. Another news story, which documents a study out of South Korea, describes how researchers developed an analytical method that simultaneously quantifies nereistoxin insecticides (NIs) and their metabolite, also called nereistoxin, in foods of animal origin.

Several news stories that document studies that explored seed variability and soil quality. One of the articles, “Study Enhances Crop Yield by Precisely Identifying High-Quality Seeds,” highlights how HS-GC-IMS can be used to distinguish between viable and non-viable seeds. In another article, scientists in Mexico, who developed a new method for detecting herbicides in agricultural soil, being based on techniques like 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC-Cl) and ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS).

To read the second part of our preview to the content series and learn more about the Q&As and peer-reviewed and featured articles that will be in our series, click here.