Third International IUPAC Symposium on Trace Elements in Food

Highlights - Opening and Oral Sessions 1 and 2

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Opening ceremony and welcome addresses

The symposium was opened by Francesco Cubadda (Symposium Chair), Agostino Macrì (Director of the Department of Food Safety and Veterinary Public Health of the ISS), and Ryszard Lobinski, who served as the IUPAC representative.

Oral Session 1 - Advances in trace element analysis in food matrices

The first session was chaired by Kevin Francesconi and Ryszard Lobinski. Recent advances in analytical science were reviewed by Joanna Szpunar (State-of-the-art analytical techniques for element speciation studies in food and food supplements), Erik H. Larsen (Detection and characterisation of inorganic nanoparticles in life science studies), and Alfredo Sanz-Medel (Speciation and Isotope Pattern Deconvolution for ICP-MS quantitative studies of minerals metabolism and supplementation).

A series of lectures dealt with recent developments in the speciation of iodine (Jose Luis Gomez-Ariza), of selenium (John Entwisle and Mihaly Dernovics) and of different metals in wine (Krystyna Pyrzynska). The isotopic and elemental fingerprints to prove authenticity and origin of food and feed were addressed as well (Thomas Prohaska).

Finally, analytical quality in the determination of trace elements was discussed in regard to internal and external quality control procedures (Maria Beatriz de la Calle) and the reliability of published analytical data (Lars Jorhem).

Oral Session 2 - Sources and transfer of trace elements in the food chain

Alberto Mantovani and Barbara Szteke chaired the second session. The session featured a series of interesting talks on selenium, opened by the invited lecture of Margaret Rayman on Food chain selenium and human health: the complexity of optimal intake. Selenium uptake, bioaccessibility and speciation were discussed in connection with plant (Anicke Brandt-Kjelsen and Darren Juniper) and animal (Qiuhui Hu and Espen Govasmark) farming.

In the second part of this session, biofortification of iron in genetically engineered rice (Christof Sautter) and of zinc through application of fertilizers (Ismail Cakmak) were treated. Finally, the effect of repeated annual applications of phosphorus fertilizers on the phytoavailability of cadmium was addressed (Cynthia Grant).