Findings on the structure and formation of luminescent protein-stabilized gold clusters reveal interlocked gold-thiolate rings and a unique bio-assembled pathway.

One of the greatest challenges facing the functional food and natural health product (NHP) industries is sourcing high-quality, functional, natural ingredients for their finished products. Unfortunately, the lack of ingredient standards, modernized analytical methodologies, and industry oversight creates the potential for low quality and, in some cases, deliberate adulteration of ingredients. By exploring a diverse library of NHPs provided by the independent certification organization ISURA, we demonstrated that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy provides an innovative solution to authenticate botanicals and warrant the quality and safety of processed foods and manufactured functional ingredients. Two-dimensional NMR experiments were shown to be a robust and reproducible approach to capture the content of complex chemical mixtures, while a binary normalization step allows for emphasizing the chemical diversity in each sample, and unsupervised statistical methodologies provide key advantages to classify, authenticate, and highlight the potential presence of additives and adulterants.

Sparse projection pursuit analysis (SPPA), a new approach for the unsupervised exploration of highdimensional chemical data, is proposed as an alternative to traditional exploratory methods such as principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Where traditional methods use variance and distance metrics for data compression and visualization, the proposed method incorporates the fourth statistical moment (kurtosis) to access interesting subspaces that can clarify relationships within complex data sets. The quasi-power algorithm used for projection pursuit is coupled with a genetic algorithm for variable selection to efficiently generate sparse projection vectors that improve the chemical interpretability of the results while at the same time mitigating the problem of overmodeling. Several multivariate chemical data sets are employed to demonstrate that SPPA can reveal meaningful clusters in the data where other unsupervised methods cannot.

No abstract

No abstract