A Compact and Low Cost High-Precision Carbon Isotope Ration Monitoring Tool for Ro

<p>DESCRIPTION: This application is in response to the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) solicitation. One of the pillars of food safety and integrity is labeling that provides a truthful designation of origin and additives in food. Unfortunately, without appropriate authentication and controls in place to ensure the safety and integrity of food, the consumer is at risk of fraud and its sometimes disastrous effects on the health and welfare of the general public. In the USA, the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) holds the responsibility of ensuring, predominantly, food safety. However, it is difficult to separate food quality from food safety, as they are interdependent. Isotopic analysis of organic compounds is a critical component of food safety studies and applications. One salient application is the use of stable isotope signature of food constituents as tools for adulteration detection and authenticity confirmation. For food safety applications, 13C variations in organic compounds are the record keepers of the authentic makeup of food item and a proof of its geographic origin. Their isotopic ratio values can be routinely monitored to ensure compliance with regulatory measures and adherence to food label statements. The tool of choice so far for such high-precision measurements are techniques based on continuous-flow Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS), namely Gas Chromatography-Combustion-IRMS. Yet, IRMS systems are prohibitively complicated to use and expensive to acquire and operate for them to be widely used as a routine practice in food quality control and authentication studies. Picarro plans to address this opportunity by extending the capabilities of the company's WS-CRDS (wavelength-scanned cavity ring down spectroscopy) instrumentation to develop a fast, simple, and inexpensive replacement for IRMS while meeting or exceeding the performance of Gas Chromatography-Combustion-IRMS (GC-C-IRMS) by coupling a low-cost isotopic CRDS analyzer to a compact Gas Chromatography- Combustion system to measure carbon isotopes of carbon dioxide as the combustion product of individual organic compounds. This effort will advance the state-of-the-art of isotope ratio monitoring instrumentation used to ensure food safety and integrity and will establish routine isotopic monitoring practices by replacing GC-C-IRMS systems with a significantly lower cost GC-C-CRDS system. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: One of the pillars of food safety and integrity is food labeling that provides a truthful designation of origin and additives in food products. Unfortunately, without appropriate routine authentication and controls in place to ensure the safety and integrity of food, the consumer is at risk of fraud and its sometimes disastrous effects on the health and welfare of the general public. Picarro plans to address this opportunity by extending the capabilities of the company's wavelength-scanned cavity ring down spectroscopy (WS-CRDS) technology to develop a fast, simple, and inexpensive Gas Chromatography-Combustion-CRDS (GC-C-CRDS) system that will advance the state-of-the-art of isotope ratio monitoring instrumentation to be used for adulteration detection and authenticity confirmation as a routine practice to ensure the safety and integrity of food products.</p>