Elemental Palette: Ionomic Profiling Across 500 Diverse Food Samples

In this webinar, Dr. Jacqueline Chaparro will present a sensitive, accurate, and comprehensive analysis using the PerkinElmer NexION ICP-MS for the simultaneous quantification of 26 mineral elements and trace metals in foods. This approach addresses a critical gap in the literature, where existing methods often measure a limited number of elements, lack demonstrated applicability across diverse food matrices, or require instrumentation not readily accessible.

Dr. Chaparro will discuss how her team applied this high-throughput method to over 500 foods from diverse plant and animal sources, demonstrating new strategies for customizing calibration curves across multiple elements and correcting for instrumental drift to enable quantification of analytes with concentrations spanning six orders of magnitude. Dr. Chaparro will share key findings on the elemental composition of foods, illustrating how these results can guide dietary recommendations, identify foods that may help mitigate mineral nutrient deficiencies, and flag foods that should be assessed for toxic metal content. The talk will also highlight technical considerations such as sample preparation, matrix effects, and quality assurance practices needed for reproducible results.