Ana Rita Monforte

Universidade Católica Portuguesa | UCP · Centro de Biotecnologia e Química Fina

The extensive use of neonicotinoid pesticides in the past two decades caused serious impacts on ecosystems due to their toxicity [1]. Finding solutions to eliminate neonicotinoids' residual levels in the environment should be a priority issue. Here, the degradation and detoxification of thiamethoxam (TMX) by the bacterial strain Labrys portucalensi...

Thiamethoxam (TMX) is an effective neonicotinoid insecticide. However, its widespread use is detrimental to non-targeted organisms and water systems. This study investigates the biodegradation of this insecticide by Labrys portucalensis F11. After 30 days of incubation in mineral salt medium, L. portucalensis F11 was able to remove 41%, 35% and 100...

Wine is characterised by an underlying aromatic volatile profile, which allows human subjects to easily recognise the product as “wine” by smell alone. Yeast metabolism significantly contributes to wine organoleptic properties, and some yeast metabolism-derived compounds contribute to the vinous character of wine. However, the relative contribution...

The present work shows key possibilities in modelling the kinetics of phenylacetaldehyde formation as a function of sugar, phenolic compounds, metals and sulphur dioxide. The release kinetics were measured online by proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry (PTR-MS). Phenylacetaldehyde formation was fitted using Weibull models and an activation en...

In times of pandemic and when sustainability is in vogue, the use of byproducts, such as fiber-rich tomato byproducts, can be an asset. There are still no studies on the impact of extraction methodologies and the gastrointestinal tract action on bioactive properties. Thus, this study used a solid fraction obtained after the conventional method (SFC...

The complexity of the chemical reactions occurring during white wine storage, such as oxidation turns the capacity of prediction and consequently the capacity to avoid it extremely difficult. This study proposes an untarget methodology based on machine learning algorithms capable to classify wines according to their “oxidative-status”. Instead of t...

Olive pomace is a biowaste rich in polyphenols and insoluble dietary fibre with high potential to develop new value chains towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. Regarding gut health, olive pomace phenolics and insoluble dietary fibre (after possible fermentation) could act as antioxidants, antimicrobial and prebiotic agents. These potentia...

The Strecker degradation of phenylalanine has been studied in phenolic/phenylalanine wine model system. Six phenolic compounds (3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid, gallic acid, caffeic acid, ferulic acid, catechin and epicatechin) were compared in the formation of phenylacetaldehyde when in the presence of glucose or methyl glyoxal. The addition of glucose...

A response surface methodology was applied to study the effect of precursors on o-quinone and phenylacetaldehyde formation in wine model systems stored at 40oC during 24 hours. The results confirmed that glucose plays an important role in reducing aldehyde formation by inhibiting the formation of o-quinone. The regression equations showed that oxyg...

Real-time measurements of many low-abundance aroma compounds in breath from release during food consumption are already feasible due to progress in analytical technologies, such as Proton Transfer Reaction-Time of Flight-Mass Spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS). Nevertheless, the information content of real-time measurements is not fully exploited, due to th...

The knowledge of the chemical processes occurring during wine aging that result in a specific chemical/sensory profile remains limited. This lack of knowledge and understanding significantly limits the ability to improve product quality and consistency. For that reason, unravelling the chemical changes occurring during aging that are responsible fo...

Sensors suitable to monitor chemical reactions leading to the formation of potent odorants in foods and consequently enabling process control are on increasing demand. In the present work real time kinetic analyses were made by developing new methodologies combining near infrared spectroscopy (NIR). These were applied to study the dynamics in pheny...

Strecker degradation (SD) leading to the formation of phenylacetaldehyde (PA) was studied.in wine systems. New insights were gained by using two full factorial designs focusing on the effect of: 1) pH and 2) temperature. In each DoE three factors: glucose, gallic acid and metals at two levels (present or absence) were varied while phenylalanine was...

Strecker degradation is a crucial reaction in relation to flavour formation, and it was established that the formation of Strecker aldehydes could be related with the Maillard reaction (1), with the reaction of the amino acid with a quinone formed by the oxidation of a phenolic compound where metals are required (2) and lately a new pathway has bee...

Network reconstruction (NR) has proven to be useful in the detection and visualization of relationships between the compounds present in a Port wine aging dataset. This view of the data provides a considerable amount of information with which to understand the kinetic contexts of the molecules represented by peaks in each chromatogram.The aim of th...

This work describes the utility and efficiency of a metabolic profiling pipeline that relies on an unsupervised and untargeted approach applied to a HS-SPME/GC-MS data. This non-invasive and high throughput methodology enables "real time" monitoring of the metabolic changes inherent to the biochemical dynamics of a perturbed complex biological syst...

Mushrooms are known all over the world both due to the remarkable gastronomic value of some species and for severe intoxications mediated by other species that are frequently difficult to distinguish from the edible ones, by the common user. Therefore, it is important to develop strategies to discover molecules that can identify mushroom species. I...

Port wine is a flagship fortified wine of Portugal, which undergoes a particular long aging period developing a dynamic sensory profile over time responsible for several wine categories. Therefore the quality of the product is dependent on the chemical mechanisms occurring during the process like oxidation or Maillard reactions. In order to attain...

Chromatography separates the different components of complex mixtures and generates a fingerprint representing the chemical composition of the sample. The resulting data structure depends on the characteristics of the detector used, univariate for devices such as a flame ionization detector (FID) or multivariate for mass spectroscopy (MS). This stu...