Miniature MasSpec Pen detects fakes in 15 seconds

Prompt detection of falsification in food products is an urgent task for veterinary services, retailers, HoReCa segment companies that risk their reputation, and, of course, consumers. Agribusiness magazine spoke about a methodology that allows you to quickly identify the discrepancy between the labeling of a food product and what is actually inside the package.

The MasSpec Pen was originally developed for use in oncology by a team of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin at the request of Genio Technologies for rapid cancer diagnosis. Subsequently, it was optimized to solve another problem - to accurately determine the most common types of MEAT and fish in food.

Using a portable device in the form of a pen, you can study the molecular composition of meat and fish products by mass spectrometry. MasSpec Pen has already been tested on beef, chicken, pork, lamb, venison and five different types of fish. When the tip of the pen touches the sample, a drop of solvent is released, releasing molecules for analysis within three seconds, a process called liquid extraction.

The device carefully, without damaging the sample, extracts protein compounds from the surface and determines their structure using mass spectrometry. The analysis takes 15 seconds. Testing on test kits of meat and fish confirmed 100% accuracy in determining protein sources. In terms of speed, such a study is 720 times faster than the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. Now the developers intend to integrate the MasSpec Pen into a portable mass spectrograph.