LABORATORY

CO.T.IR. chemical laboratory supports inner experimentation and provides services to third parties. It is equipped with scientific instruments and equipment:

• Instrumentation to determine COD

• Instrumentation to determine BOD

• Kjeldhal digester

• Steam current distiller

• Microwave mineralizer  

• UV/vis spectrophotometer

• A.A. spectrophotometer with flame and electric-thermal atomization systems

• Ionic chromatograph  

At present our instruments are analyzing water, soil, fodder, RSU compost, grape and must samples. We also started working with a high resolution spectrometer NMR acquired recently.

 NMR technique is based on  some atoms behaviour and emission of signals such as ¹H, ¹³C e ³¹P, when they are in an external magnetic field. Its first applications were developed in medical field, but afterwards this technique has been developed in many other sectors, among which research applied to agriculture and to agricultural and food industry. CO.T.IR. spectrometer is a 600 MHz FT-NMR, digital high performance, calibrated to analyse liquids and semi-solids, so it can be used in many fields (medical, pharmaceutical, environmental, alimentary, agricultural and food area).

In the last few years a new research line is  consolidating within agricultural and food area: thanks to the use of a sophisticated instrument present at CO.T.IR.: NMR .

At present C.O.T.IR. researchers are carrying out the following activities:

-         interregional project “Development of innovative methods to exploit typical products and regional strategies” aimed to define a methodology based on the  application of NMR technique able to recognize the geographical origin of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo wine and to distinguish Sulmona red garlic according to specific markers.

Wine contains several hundreds compounds with different concentration. The main ones are water, ethanol, glycerol, sugar, organic acids and some ions.

The chemical analysis of compex products such as wine are very important in order to determine the different prductions qualitative characteristics.

In this work we registered 1H monodimensional spectra to identify amino-acids in different wine samples. The amino-acid composition is very important to distinguish the geographical origin, the species variety of wine and the production year, moreover amino-acids are a source of nitrogen for leaven during fermentation and can influence wine bouquet.

Fig.1. Typical 1H-NMR spectrum of lyophilized wine. 

 Fig.1- 1H-NMR  spectrum of lyophilized wine acquired by water peak suppression at 4.7ppm.

With regard to the characterization of Sulmona red garlic according to its functional principles, we are trying to establish possible links between agronomic conduction methods and qualitative and productive characteristics which characterize garlic produced with biological and conventional method following two main activity lines: analysis with GC-MS techniques of the liposoluble volatile compounds and analysis with NMR techniques. This project is very innovative with regard to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance which, so far in these studies concerning garlic, had mainly a role to determine the molecular structure of the insulated metabolites.

Furthermore, we will also explore the capacity of this tecnique (High resolution protonic NMR) together with multivariated statistical analysis in order to point out the link between an agricultural and food product and its provenance territory.

-         Interregional Program “Agriculture and Quality” at present we have in progress a research activity aimed to characterize the animal origin of some cheeses from Abruzzi provinces to evaluate the applicability of a method based on NMR techniques to  exploit the cheeses produced in Abruzzi.

For this purpose we identified almost all the fat acids in cow-cheese, sheep-cheese and goat-cheese and we are assigning resonance peaks thanks to mono and bidimensional spectra. At last, we will carry out a multivariate statistical analysis on the spectra in order to individuate hypothetical markers to discriminate cheese animal origins.

Fig.2.  Sheep-cheese spectrum.

 Fig.2  13C-NMR Spectrum of cheep-cheese

 Moreover, in order to exploit and enhance the qualitative and healthy  characteristics  of Abruzzi typical cheeses we are carrying out Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) studies which can investigate on cheese minor compounds (indicating nutritive quality) such as oxidized fat cheeses with different ripening levels.

This work aims at showing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance potentiality  to give quickly information on cheese quality and freshness by investigating on its minor compounds.

We have also in progress a project on grain legumes: “Grain legumes: strategies to  recover and exploit them”. We will study grain qualitative characteristics thanks to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in order to exploit regional typical yields by using innovative procedures to track down the same yields.

Thus, if we use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, we can obtain structural and qualitative information on many compounds in little time, so NMR is suitable for a high number of samples to be analysed and compared. Moreover, seeing that most of the foods are perishable and subjected to many chemical and biochemical changes, NMR is a valid method to follow these variations and to minimize the changes of samples chemical composition from the taking to the analysis.

In short, NMR spectroscopy seems a very advantageous technique for agricultural and food analysis because we can obtain information in a short time on a large number of compounds, because we need little quantities of samples and because it is very easy to prepare these samples.