Gulf food-safety chemists will soon be inundated with samples as the fishing industry and state officials scramble to analyze seafood catches as safe across the gulf. Most of the machines used in the region are fairly old, says Paez, running typical samples to determine levels of hydrocarbon contaminants in roughly 40 minutes. He says new machines, with methods the Thermo team is racing to finalize, could do it in 10 minutes, he estimates.
The newer methods could also find more information, he says. Most seafood safety chemists look for the most important toxicants in oil, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Paez’s team is developing a single test that will reveal if the oil constituents found in samples match the chemical profile of the Deepwater crude, which Paez recently flew to Louisiana to collect.
Dispersant could be another challenge for food safety, and toward that end, Paez’s chemists are hoping to offer analytical methods to spot it in seafood. “We’re in new territory dumping so much of this dispersant in one place,” he says.
Referencia: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinside…