Innovative Analytical Strategies to Ensure Food Safety

Dear Colleagues,

The occurrence of toxic compounds in food is a topic of utmost importance within the food safety field to guarantee the health of consumers. These substances may occur in food endogenously (implicit constituents or generated in a natural way along their evolution) or exogenously (toxic compounds that occur in food as contaminants as a result of technological and industrial processes or environmental pollution). Nevertheless, they are usually found at very low concentration levels, and the high complexity of food matrices hinders their extraction and detection. Thus, innovative analytical strategies need to be developed to minimize the complexity of samples and to eliminate most of the matrix interferences before their introduction into the analytical instrument, so that the control of these compounds in food can be sensitively and accurately addressed, meeting the requirements established in international guidelines. 

This Special Issue aims to be a call for the latest innovative methodologies applied to the determination of toxic compounds in food samples, including natural toxins such as mycotoxins, plant alkaloids (pyrrolizidine, tropane, and opiate alkaloids) or phycotoxins, as well as toxic compounds formed during food production (including feed and primary production), food processing or food packaging. Moreover, manuscripts dealing with the occurrence of environmental chemicals (such as persistent contaminants and metals) will also be considered. Authors are invited to submit original and innovative research articles or comprehensive review papers on this topic, showing the potential of new analytical strategies to ensure food safety.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Sonia Morante Zarcero
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.