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doi:10.1094/CFW-54-4-0152 |
VIEW ARTICLE TD-NMR Technology: A Noninvasive Tool for High-Throughput QC and Rapid Cereal Product Improvement S. Ghosh and X. Tombokan. Bruker Corporation, The Woodlands, TX, U.S.A. Cereal Foods World 54(4):152-157. The life of cereal food begins when they are harvested in the field. At this point, the cereal grains need to be assessed for quality, especially in terms of composition, in order to determine whether they will contribute to the required food value of the final product and the required shelf life. After harvesting, cereal grains are transported to the production facilities for intermediate or final product manufacturing, where they go through several processing steps. Various unit operations are applied to the cereal grains in order to achieve final product characteristics. During these processing steps, changes occur in the cereal food materials at the molecular level, resulting in desirable, macroscopically observed physicochemical properties. Therefore, a rapid tool to quantitatively monitor the composition of cereal grains and products becomes very useful. A technique that could rapidly and noninvasively quantify the molecular level changes occurring to the cereal products during the processing steps could become a powerful tool for process control and product development. Time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) is a technology that meets these requirements. TD-NMR can very rapidly (in most cases, in seconds) look at material properties at a molecular level. The measurement is noninvasive and does not need any solvent or other chemicals for sample preparation. Thus, this technology is being widely used for various process control, quality control, and R&D applications in many industries, including but not limited to food, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, polymer, biotechnology, and consumer goods (18,19).
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