Strengthening of the Italian Research Infrastructure for Metrology and Open Access Data in support to the Agrifood
UNIRM1 – Smart assessment of food quality & safety
(Reference person: Massimo Reverberi)
The OU is composed by two cooperating laboratories: the Plant Pathology Lab (plantpathologylab.com) of the Department of Environmental Biology and the Green LC-MS Lab of the Department of Chemistry. The research groups have an outstanding scientific expertise in the use of different instrumental platforms and complement their own expertise dedicated since 30 years on the farm2fork quality & safety aspects. Notably, the first has expertise in studying crop performances under various stress with a specific focus on climate change, pests & pathogens. For the second group the most important topics concern: development and validation of methods based on chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques for the analysis of food contaminants, vitamins, chiral pesticides and aroma compounds inter alia; development and validation of methods for authenticity assessment through molecular markers developed using third generation sequencing methods (e.g., Oxford Nanopore Technology). The two group in synergy can also study development of systems for the controlled growth of plants and the online and real time control of the volatilome, expression of the different metabolic pathways activated under several stresses. The Department of Environmental Biology hosts the Smart PHYTOTRON, which is part of the Research Infrastructure of Sapienza University (SRI) and is an integrated system of equipment that allows carrying out in vivo measurements, delineating the time-response of different functional processes, identifying for each the best functional and metabolic marker.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Lab
Green LC-MS Lab
Massimo Reverberi
(Department of Environmental Biology), is the Scientific Coordinator of the Plant pathology Lab, responsible for the big infrastructure Integrated Smart phytotron, president of the innovative start-up SARA Envimob and president of the course in agro-industrial and food biotechnology. His main expertise is in plant pathogens specifically related to alteration of crop and food safety: mycotoxins & pesticides. He’s expert in Fungal Genetics and in Mycotoxins. He is the scientific member of the agreement that associate Sapienza University with CREA (the national centre for the research in economy linked to agriculture). He is vice-president of the Italian Society of Plant Pathology. At international level he is the Italian representative for the International Scientific Committee of Fungal Genetics and share collaboration with its members (e.g., marc henry Lebrun chief of the Versailles unit of INRAE).
Luciana Dini
Is full professor of comparative anatomy and cytology at the Department of Biology and Biotechnology Charles Darwin-University of Rome Sapienza. She is an expert in the characterization of nanomaterials, mainly from a ultrastructural morphological point of view and in safety studies in cells, tissues and organisms. She is also involved in assessment of nanomaterials in agri/food/ products and of nanoproduct based food on animal and human health.
Alessandra Gentili
(MD, PhD; Department of Chemistry) is a Full Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Sapienza University of Rome. She is Director of the Reseacrh Centre “Hydro-Eco”, whose mission is to develop scientific and technological activities focused on energy and materials from renewable sources. She is also Director of the advanced professional course on "Scientific investigation techniques in the food sector"- aimed at training a professional post-graduated figure, specialized in the fight against food frauds. Her scientific activity also concerns the development of novel analytical methodologies with a special focus on sample preparation, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and green approaches. She is co-author of 121 peer-reviewed journal articles and 10 book chapters. She is a member of editorial boards, such as Journal of Chromatography A, Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis Open, and Molecules.