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Michel Neilsen, professor of analytical chemistry at Wageningen University & Research, was recently interviewed about an EU-funded project to develop smartphone-based food screening capabilities.

The FoodSmartphone project aims to develop smartphone-based (bio)analytical sensing and diagnostics tools for simplified on-site rapid pre-screening of food. The three-year project is scheduled to wrap up in December.

Nielsen explains that the project works to develop a device that can be attached or connected to a shopper's smartphone to test for allergens, pesticides, and whether the product is organic. The team hopes to empower shoppers to test food at the shelf.

The interview was recently published by Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine from the European Commission, and can be read here.

Milk adulteration normally involves dilution with water or whey and adding other nitrogen sources such as ammonium salts, urea, melamine or non-dairy proteins. The established method for detecting added water in milk is to determine its freezing point depression, however, this method would not be effective to detect most milk adulterations. Brazilian researchers have developed a rapid and simple method to screen milk for adulteration, which involves precipitation of the milk proteins with copper sulphate and measuring the intensity of remaining copper salt after complexing with EDTA with a smartphone  and a colorimetric app. The method was tested by adulterating milk with ammonium chloride, urea and melamine, and was able to detect the addition of 1% added water to the milk.

Read the abstract here