Intact food analysis by means of HRMAS-NMR spectroscopy

High-resolution magic-angle spinning (HRMAS) is a fairly recently developed technique in NMR spectroscopy, whose main feature is to allow the significant reduction of anisotropy in semisolid materials and obtain high-resolution NMR spectra, when a rotor containing the material is placed at the magic angle to the magnetic field and spun at high frequency. The technique thus offers the opportunity to evaluate the molecular composition of biological tissue without any extraction or pretreatment. While HRMAS is already widely applied in biomedicine, its application in food chemistry is only at the initial stage. This review reports the most recent advances on the application of HRMAS techniques to agrofood products, such as cereals, fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and fish and meat. The HRMAS potential to assess the quality and the geographical origin is enhanced when the carefully selected NMR signals data are elaborated by multivariate analysis techniques. The combination of HRMAS results with multivariate statistics was proven to provide a robust response to the producer and consumer requirements for the assessment of food quality and security, thereby indicating that HRMAS will certainly become an increasingly selected technique in food chemistry.