Fast Automated Food Safety Screening - FAFOSS

Current methods for measuring contaminants in foodstuffs are often slow and costly. In this project fast and robust parrallel measurements of multiple food samples for important contaminants will be investigated . This will be achieved by using high throughput laboratory robots to carry out unattended sample preparation for high performance thin layer chromatography. The proposed technique should also prove invaluable in emergency situations when large numbers of samples need to be screened to determine which samples are contaminated and which product batches should be withdrawn. In addition new instrumentation for thin layer chromatgraphy - mass spectrometry will be investigated for the quantitative analysis of samples that were indicated as "positive" in the intial screen. This will remove the need for the additional sampling/sample processing and analysis that is currently required.