Handheld “MasSpec Pen” Reveals Meat and Fish Fraud in Seconds

 There are already ways to detect if meat is authentic in its name or not but that process takes hours to days to process at off-site labs. Now there is a new way of using the amounts of molecular components to very meat sources. The MasSpec pen takes a small sample of the compounds in the meat in seconds and puts it through a mass spectrometer. It can examine the molecular composition of grass-fed beef, chicken, pork, lamb, venison, and common fish from the grocery stores. You have to press the tip of the pen to the meat and a microliter solvent will be released to extract a good amount of molecules for an accurate mass spectrometry analysis. The whole process takes about 15 seconds and does not harm the meat. Later the team who invented this developed authentication models based on distinctions of meats, then each subsection could distinguish pure meats from “not so” ones.

O'Neill, M. (2021, May 15). Handheld "MasSpec PEN" Reveals meat and Fish fraud in seconds. Retrieved May 29, 2021, from https://scitechdaily.com/handheld-masspec-pen-reveals-meat-and-fish-fraud-in-seconds/