Seafood Quality

Objective 1: Identify chemical compounds by name found in raw and steamed shrimp, oysters, clams, and lobsters harvested from Florida waters and monitor changes during frozen storage.Solid-Phase Microextraction (SPME) is a method used to extract volatile aroma compounds from the headspace of a vial after equilibrium conditions between the sample and the headspace are met (Béné et al. 2001a). After 20 years of flavor analysis and thousands of peer-reviewed publications, headspace SPME has established itself as the most widely published extraction method for volatile organic compound analysis of foods.Semi-volatile compounds analyzed by UHPLC will be included as a part of the aroma fingerprinting that determines quality attributes. There are a number of aroma compounds found in seafood integral to flavor and quality that are considered semi-volatile. For example, geosmin is a compound directly related to muddy off-flavor and aroma and is responsible for the inferior flavor quality of many aquacultured finfish when compared to wild caught. Other semi-volatile compounds important to seafood quality include putracine, cadaverine, and indole, which are all difficult to extract by headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME).Finally, Objective 1 will generate chemical data from raw and steamed shrimp, oysters, clams, lobster and evaluate changes in aroma during frozen storage after two, four, and over six months.Objective 2: Develop training procedures for industry using the aroma fingerprinting of raw and steamed Florida shrimp, oysters, clams, and lobster.Reliance on sensory experts in the seafood industry has been the tried and true methods to determine seafood quality, especially as it relates to the sensory techniques of the Food and Drug Administration, where instrumental correlations to sensory results are not currently used to measure seafood quality. Although sensory analysis alone is quite effective and efficient, resulting information obtained involves the potential for bias, panelist variability, and other consequences of subjective human data collection.Quantitative Flavor Profiling (QFP) is a modification of quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA). In QFP, only the essential flavor attributes of a product are studied, as opposed to QDA that profiles all sensory attributes of a product. QFP uses flavor descriptors and physical references to quantify compounds in a food product and is often correlated to instrumental analyses to validate results.