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Publications (177)
This study presents a comprehensive metabolomic analysis of Parmigiano Reggiano samples to differentiate between those designated as Mountain Quality Certification (QC) and conventional Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). Despite following the same production protocol, these cheese varieties differ in the cows’ feeding
regimes and milk stable lo...
Sustainable waste management is an extremely important issue due to its environmental, economic, and social impacts. Knowledge of the chemical composition of the waste produced is a starting point for its valorization. This research focuses, for the first time, on the by-products of pasta condiment production, starting with their characterization....
Near Infrared spectroscopy (NIR), in combination with Chemometrics, has been used for many years in diverse scenarios, mostly focused on the classification and quantitation of properties in food, pharmaceutical preparations , artwork material, etc. This success has been possible due to their desirable properties: fast, reliable (under certain condi...
This work tested near-infrared (NIR) and UV-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics to characterize flours from different starch origins. In particular, eighteen starch-containing flours (e.g., type 00 flour, rye, barley, soybean, chestnut, potato, spelt, buckwheat, oat, millet, rice, durum wheat, amaranth, chickpea, sesame, corn, h...
Chemometrics, or the application of multivariate statistics to chemical data, provides informative and statistically valid analyses within a forensic context and there has been an increase in the use of chemometrics to characterise forensic exhibits. Introducing chemometric methods suitable for forensic practitioners, this book fills a gap in the l...
After amputation, granular hemocytes infiltrate the blastema of regenerating cephalic tentacles of the freshwater snail Pomacea canaliculata. Here, the circulating phagocytic hemocytes were chemically depleted by injecting the snails with clodronate liposomes, and the effects on the cephalic tentacle regeneration onset and on Pc-Hemocyanin, Pc-tran...
Iron(II) bis-pyrazolilpyridyl (bpp-R) complexes [Fe(bpp-R)2](X)2·solvent, R = substituent and X- = anion, can undergo a spin transition from high (S = 2, HS) to low spin (S = 0, LS), being spin crossover (SCO) in the solid state. The distortion of the octahedral coordination environment around the metal centre is governed by crystal packing, i.e. t...
This article contains a comprehensive tutorial on classification by means of Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA). Such a tutorial was conceived in an attempt to offer pragmatic guidelines for a sensible and correct utilisation of this tool as well as answers to three basic questions: "why employing SIMCA?", "when employing SIMCA?" a...
In the present feasibility study, SPME Arrow-GC-MS method coupled with chemometric techniques, was used for investigating the impact of two different storage conditions, namely freezing and refrigeration, on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of different commercial breads. The SPME Arrow technology was used as it is a novel extraction technique, ab...
The food industry needs tools to improve the efficiency of their production processes by minimizing waste, detecting timely potential process issues, as well as reducing the efforts and workforce devoted to laboratory analysis while, at the same time, maintaining high-quality standards of products. This can be achieved by developing on-line monitor...
Alternating least squares within the multivariate curve resolution framework has seen a lot of practical applications and shows their distinction with their relatively simple and flexible implementation. However, the limitations of least squares should be carefully considered when deviating from the standard assumed data structure. Within this work...
Alternating least squares, within the multivariate curve resolution framework has seen a lot of practical applications and shows its distinction with its relatively simple and flexible implementation. However, the limitations of least squares should be considered carefully when deviating from the standard assumed data structure. Within this work we...
Fourier-Transform mid-infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy offers a strong candidate screening tool for rapid, non-destructive and early detection of unauthorized virgin olive oil blends with other edible oils. Potential applications to the official anti-fraud control are supported by dozens of research articles with a “proof-of-concept” study approach thr...
Alternating least squares, within the multivariate curve resolution framework has seen a lot of practical applications and shows its distinction with its relatively simple and flexible implementation. However, the limitations of least squares should be considered carefully when deviating from the standard assumed data structure. Within this work we...
The scientific interest in Cannabis sativa L. analysis has been rapidly increasing in recent years, especially for what concerns cannabinoids, plant secondary metabolites which are well known for having many biological properties. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is frequently used for both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of...
A new self‐consistent empirical potential model based on the BMP potential [Bertani et al., Phys. Rev. Mat. 5 (2021) 045602] has been developed for the simulation of multicomponent borate and borosilicate glasses. We exploited the Bayesian optimization approach to create a set of parameters for the B–O interaction, which depends on the glass compos...
Owing to their antimicrobial and insecticide properties, the use of natural compounds like essential oils and their active components has proven to be an effective alternative to synthetic chemicals in different fields ranging from drug delivery to agriculture and from nutrition to food preservation. Their limited application due to the high volati...
The aim of this work is to assess the potentialities of the synergistic combination of an ultra-fast chromatography-based electronic nose as a fingerprinting technique and multivariate data analysis in the context of food quality control and to investigate the influence of some factors, i.e., basil variety, cut, and year of crop, in the final aroma...
Petrochemical companies aim at assessing final product quality in real time, in order to rapidly deal with possible plant faults and to reduce chemical wastes and staff effort resulting from the many laboratory analyses performed every day. In order to answer these needs, the main purpose of the current work is to explore the feasibility of multibl...
A new ceramic carbon polyaniline electrode material, namely Sonogel-Carbon-polyaniline (SNG-C-PANI), was synthesized using high-power ultrasound. The synthesis conditions were optimized by means of a full factorial design. The electroactivity of polyaniline, previously characterized by means of Raman spectroscopy, is retained into the sonogel matri...
The emergence of new spectral imaging applications in many science fields and in industry has not come to be a surprise, considering the immense potential this technique has to map spectral information. In the case of near-infrared spectral imaging, a rapid evolution of the technology has made it more and more appealing in non-destructive analysis...
Process analytical technology and multivariate process monitoring are nowadays the most effective approaches to achieve real-time quality monitoring/control in production. However, their use is not yet a common practice, and industries benefit much less than they could from the outcome of the hundreds of sensors that constantly monitor production i...
Basil is a plant known worldwide for its culinary and health attributes. It counts more than a hundred and fifty species and many more chemo-types due to its easy cross-breeds. Each species and each chemo-type have a typical aroma pattern and selecting the proper one is crucial for the food industry. Twelve basil varieties have been studied over th...
In humans, injuries and diseases can result in irreversible tissue or organ loss. This well-known fact has prompted several basic studies on organisms capable of adult regeneration, such as amphibians, bony fish, and invertebrates. These studies have provided important biological information and helped to develop regenerative medicine therapies, bu...
The consumers' interest towards beer consumption has been on the rise during the past decade: new approaches and ingredients get tested, expanding the traditional recipe for brewing beer. As a consequence, the field of "beeromics" has also been constantly growing, as well as the demand for quick and exhaustive analytical methods. In this study, we...
The metal content in some samples of horse chestnut seeds (Aesculus hippocastanum) was monitored over time (years 2016–2019) considering the two most common and representative Mediterranean varieties: the pure species (AHP, which gives white flowers) and a hybrid one (AHH, which gives pink flowers). The selected elemental composition of the samples...
Understanding mechanisms of materials deterioration during service life is fundamental for their confident use in the building sector. This work presents analysis of time series of data related to wood weathering acquired at three scales (molecular, microscopic, macroscopic) with different sensors. By using several complementary techniques, the mat...
Raman spectroscopy, and handheld spectrometers in particular, are gaining increasing attention in food quality control as a fast, portable, non-destructive technique. Furthermore, this technology also allows for measuring the intact sample through the packaging and, with respect to near infrared spectroscopy, it is not affected by the water content...
We propose a methodological framework to extract spatial features in hyperspectral imaging data and establish a link between these features and the spectral regions, capturing the observed structural patterns. The proposed approach consists of five main steps: (i) two‐dimensional stationary wavelet transform (2D‐SWT) is applied to a hyperspectral d...
In this Chapter, the state-of-the-art approaches for the classification of multi-way data is presented and discussed. The theoretical basis and applicative guidelines for multilinear (or multi-way) Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (NPLS-DA) and Multi-way Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (NSIMCA) are detailed. Furthermore, two-d...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the current gold standard for the diagnosis of brain tumors. However, despite the development of MRI techniques, the differential diagnosis of central nervous system (CNS) primary pathologies, such as lymphoma and glioblastoma or tumor‐like brain lesions and glioma, is often challenging. MRI can be supported by i...
Spainisoneofthemajorproducersofhigh-qualitywinevinegarshavingthreeprotecteddesignationsoforigin
(a.k.a. PDOs): “Vinagre de Jerez”, “Vinagre de Condado de Huelva” and “Vinagre de Montilla-Moriles”. Their
highpricesduetotheirhighqualityandtheirhighproductioncostsexplaintheneedfordevelopinganadequate
qualitycontroltechniqueandtheinterestinextensivecha...
Multivariate exploratory data analysis allows revealing patterns and extracting information from complex multivariate data sets. However, highly complex data may not show evident groupings or trends in the principal component space, e.g. because the variation of the variables are not grouped but rather continuous. In these cases, classical explorat...
With the growing availability of high throughput methodologies for food characterization and analysis, more and more data are being collected on food products that can be used for the authentication of their quality. In this context, the availability of different multi-block strategies, each with its own peculiarities and providing specific details...
This study summarizes the results obtained from a systematic and long-term project aimed at the development of tools to assess the provenance of food in the oenological sector. In particular, ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr isotope ratios were measured on statistically representative set of soils, vine branches and wines sampled in the production district of Modena, wor...
Classification methods, i.e., the chemometric strategies for predicting a qualitative response, find many applications in the omic sciences, where often data are collected in order to categorize individuals (e.g. according to whether they were treated or administered a placebo or, for instance, depending on if they were healthy or ill). After a bri...
The use of 2D discrete wavelet transform in the feature enhancement phase of multivariate image analysis is discussed and implemented in a comparative way with respect to previous publications. In the proposed approach, all the resulting subimages obtained by discrete wavelet transform decomposition are unfolded pixel‐wise and midlevel data fused t...
The concern of society about food nowadays extends to the several aspects linked to food consumption encompassing nutritional value, health, safety, and quality, as well as ethics, sustainability, tradition, communication, marketing, and so on. The increased information available to the consumers, the awareness of the impact of diet on healthiness,...
The need to consider variability due to raw materials, seasonality, agricultural practices, and food processing, that are aspects which all play a role in authenticity tasks, justifies the need for chemometrics methods. This chapter presents a few basic chemometrics methods, such as exploratory data analysis, multiway data analysis, and data fusion...
The direct chemical analysis allows investigating samples without altering them, keeping the sample available for further analysis. For the qualitative investigation, analytical procedures like gas-chromatography, Raman microscopy, and Infra Red spectroscopy are available, however, the univariate approach is not exhaustive in the case of very compl...
The study aimed at investigating the correlations among the physical and bulk properties of carrier based dry powder inhaler formulations and the performance of the powder inhaler device estimated by in-vitro tests for a specific active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), and at obtaining predictive models for the in-vitro performance. Samples from sc...
The chapter illustrates the benefits and improvements of the integration of the wavelet transform with multivariate data analysis upon multiresolution analysis. This approach can be used for feature extraction both in signals and in images in a broad sense, focusing on the capability to simultaneously accomplish denoising and feature enhancement/se...
Dry powder Inhalers (DPI) are pharmaceutical drug products for respiratory diseases treatment. In such drug products, a micronized Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) is mixed with other excipients able to improve the API delivery during patient inhalation. Micronization affects API particle size, and it is a critical step during development of...
When trying to analyze spatial relationships in image analysis, wavelets appear as one of the state-of-the-art tools. However, image analysis is a problem-dependent issue, and different applications might require different wavelets in order to gather the main sources of variation in the acquired images with respect to the specific task to be perfor...
Geographical origin and authenticity of food are topics of interest for both consumers and producers. Among the different indicators used for traceability studies, (87)Sr/(86)Sr isotopic ratio has provided excellent results. In this study, two analytical approaches for wine sample pre-treatment, microwave and low temperature mineralisation, were in...
Nowadays the necessity to reveal the hidden information from complex data sets is increasing due to the development of high-throughput instrumentation. The possibility to jointly analyze data sets arising from different sources (e.g. different analytical determinations/platforms) allows capturing the latent information that would not be extracted b...
Food chain traceability, identification of adulteration and the control of labelling compliance are areas that require evaluation of foodstuff in its entirety. More and more researchers are investigating the possibility of using multidimensional or hyphenated techniques for fingerprinting of food products. However, these techniques produce data str...
In the last decades, mankind has become totally aware about the importance of food quality: nowadays authentication and traceability are words of general use.Food authentication verifies how much a food is in accordance with its label description and law and it could be considered a further guarantee for the quality and safety of a foodstuff.The tr...
In the food research and production field, system complexity is increasing and several new challenges are emerging every day. This implies an urgent necessity to extract information and obtain models capable of inferring the underlying relationships that link all the variability sources which characterize food or its production process (e.g. compos...
The main goal of this study was to evaluate (87)Sr/(86)Sr ratio in different matrices, namely soils, branches, and grape juices, of an oenological food chain in order to develop a robust analytical strategy able to link the investigated food to its territory of origin. The (87)Sr/(86)Sr has been used as traceability marker and several aspects, affe...
Multilinear PLS (NPLS) and its discriminant version (NPLS-DA) are very diffuse tools to model multi-way data arrays. Analysis of NPLS weights and NPLS regression coefficients allows data patterns, feature correlation and covariance structure to be depicted. In this study we propose an extension of the Variable Importance in Projection (VIP) paramet...
The interest of consumers, as well as of producers, toward origin and quality
of food has increased over the last years. As regards the oenological field, the
quality of wine is in many cases related to the concept of terroir (history,
geographical origin, typical raw materials and methods, ecc.). In this context,
the assessment of the link between...
In the baking industry, a difficult task is to keep the quality perceived by the consumer as constant as possible, given the inner variability of flour, e.g. due to different wheat mixtures, harvesting time, etc. Here, we evaluated the influence of flour batches properties on bread quality, considering an industrial bread making process. In particu...
The present research is part of a project dealing with the development of analytical methodologies mainly based on primary indicators, such as isotopic ratios of stable and radiogenic elements, for the authenticity and geographical traceability of oenological food, typical of the Modena district. In particular, considering the objective of establis...
A hierarchical data fusion approach has been developed proposing multivariate curve resolution (MCR) as a variable reduction tool. The case study presented concerns the characterization of soil samples of the Modena District. It was performed in order to understand, at a pilot study stage, the geographical variability of the zone prior to planning...
A mixture design of experiment approach was followed to explore formulation effects on the technological properties of wheat flours optimized for industrial bread-making purposes. Ten different flour mixtures were investigated by means of near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to obtain information on flour performance in a critical phase such as dough...
This work proposes a fast and simple method for detection and quantification of phenolic compounds in PDO Lambrusco wines using HPLC-DAD and chemometric techniques. Samples belonging to three different varieties of Lambrusco (Grasparossa, Salamino and Sorbara) were analyzed to provide a methodology appropriate for routine analysis. Given the high c...
Aim of this work is to assess the potentialities of the X-ray powder diffraction technique as fingerprinting technique, i.e. as a preliminary tool to assess soil samples variability, in terms of geochemical features, in the context of food geographical traceability. A correct approach to sampling procedure is always a critical issue in scientific i...
The results obtained by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations and Multiway Explorative Data Analysis on ADAMTS4, ADAMTS5 and MMP13 complexed with Marimastat and two cis-1(S)2(R)-amino-2-indanol ligands suggest that determinant characteristics for ligand binding and selectivity among the three enzymes are to be found in the different protein confo...
The p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase is activated by environmental stress and cytokines and plays a role in transcriptional regulation and inflammatory responses. Factors influencing the activity and selectivity of the p38α mitogen-activated protein kinase inhibitors have been investigated in this paper by inspecting the binding orientation and...
Hierarchical grid transformation is a powerful approach to SDS 2DPAGE maps warping. The hierarchy of the warping transformation is able to model both global and local deformations of the gels and the algorithm can be stopped when a certain degree of accuracy in the image alignment is obtained. The numerical optimization of the position of the nodes...
Potentially bioactive fluorine-containing glasses of formula 46.2SiO(2)·24.3Na(2)O·(26.9-x)CaO·2.6P(2)O(5)·xCaF(2) [x = (0), 5, 10, 15] have been studied: the study was carried out as a function of fluorine percentage, dimensions and time of soaking in SBF. The results are compared to those obtained in the same conditions for Bioglass(®) 45S5. Due...
An approach, based on multivariate control chart (MCC) methodology, was proposed by Li Vigni et al., that allows monitoring of flour quality and early identification of flour batches potentially leading to poor performance in production. Using this approach, all rheological properties of incoming flour batches are evaluated multivariately, and thes...
This chapter appraises the seeds of horse chestnuts (. Aesculus hippocastanum [AH]) and their derived products. Escin, the major bioactive principle in AH seeds, has shown satisfactory evidence of clinically significant activity in the treatment of chronic venous insufficiency, hemorrhoids, postoperative edema, and mammary induration. There is some...
The use of a Dynamic Headspace System (DHS) device combined with a Thermal Desorption Unit (TDU) interfaced to a Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) system is proposed for the determination of furfurals in oenological products. An experimental design protocol has been employed for the optimization of the instrumental settings concerning DH...
In the literature there are only fewpapers concernedwith classification methods for multi-way arrays. Themost common procedure, by far, is to unfold the multi-way data array into an ordinary matrix and then to apply the traditional multivariate tools for classification. As opposed to unfolding the data several possibilities exist for building class...
The aim of this work is to investigate the performance of multivariate classification techniques like partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) when using Zernike moments as global image descriptors, in the classification of sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electropho...