Congratulations to Sara McGrath at the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for winning the 2017 NACRW Excellence in Sample Prep Award!

Marilyn J Schneider, Steven J Lehotay, and Alan R Lightfield at the US Department of Agriculture recently published a paper in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.

UCT is known around the world as the first company to commercialize the QuEChERS ((Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe) approach and is proud to support facilities involved in food safety testing using this technique. In a new paper published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.6b05051) by S. Genualdi et al., (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Maryland, USA) the simultaneous analysis of 3- monochloropropane-1,2-diol (3-MCPD) and 1,3 dichloropropane-2-ol (1,3-DCP) was executed in asian style sauces. In this report UCT’s extraction mylar pouches (AOAC Blend) which include 6 g MgSO4 with 1.5 g of sodium acetate and dSPE clean-up pouches containing 400 mg of PSA and 400 mg of C18 were employed to perform the QuEChERS extraction prior to analysis of 3-MCPD and 1,3-DCP. This new method utilized direct analysis of the extract without derivatization using gas chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS). The developed method was applied to 60 genuine soy sauce samples to determine if concentrations have changed since the FDA limit was set in 2008.