Publications by authors named "Poucke C"

The jujube honey from the Moroccan Middle Atlas area is thoroughly described in this study, which takes into account melissopalynological, physicochemical, antioxidant, mineral, and phytochemical characteristics. Twelve samples of jujube honey underwent in-depth analyses between 2019 and 2021. The honey's unifloral origin was confirmed by pollen analysis, which revealed that pollen predominated along with pollen from 21 other species.

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The overall well-being of organisms is widely recognized to be closely intertwined with their intestinal health. The intestinal mucosal layer plays a pivotal role in ensuring the proper functioning of the intestine, a fact observed not only in humans but also in animals like pigs. Any alterations to the mucosal layer of a pig's intestine can potentially disrupt its functionality, thereby impacting the animal's health and productivity.

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Chitosan, sourced from abundant chitin-rich waste streams, emerges as a promising candidate in the realm of future functional materials and chemicals. While showing numerous advantageous properties, chitosan sometimes falls short of competing with today's non-renewable alternatives. Chemical derivatization, particularly through N-alkylation, proves promising in enhancing hydrophobic functionalities.

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The chemical burden on the environment and human population is increasing. Consequently, regulatory risk assessment must keep pace to manage, reduce, and prevent adverse impacts on human and environmental health associated with hazardous chemicals. Surveillance of chemicals of known, emerging, or potential future concern, entering the environment-food-human continuum is needed to document the reality of risks posed by chemicals on ecosystem and human health from a one health perspective, feed into early warning systems and support public policies for exposure mitigation provisions and safe and sustainable by design strategies.

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Article Synopsis
  • Vegetables undergo processing before consumption, and their functional properties continue to change during digestion due to conditions like heat, pH changes, and enzymes.
  • This study focused on the stability and bioaccessibility of key nutrients in Brussels sprouts and leeks during simulated digestion, revealing that water-soluble compounds remained stable but vitamin C significantly decreased.
  • While water-soluble compounds were fully absorbable, lipid-soluble nutrients showed varied bioaccessibility, ranging from 26% to 81%.
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Studies on the bioavailability, serum levels, and absorption of hydrolyzable tannin compounds are lacking. In this study, we performed a pharmacokinetic trial, measured the serum levels of compounds in broilers that were reared with different feed added or not with tannins, and tested the digestibility of tannins throughout the intestinal tract. Only gallic acid and 4--methyl gallic acid were found in the serum.

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Vegetable processing often consists of multiple processing steps. Research mostly focused on the impact of individual processing steps on individual health-related compounds. However, there is a need for more holistic approaches to understand the overall impact of the processing chain on the health potential of vegetables.

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In a growing multidrug-resistant environment, the identification of potential new drug candidates with an acceptable safety profile is a substantial crux in pharmaceutical discovery. This review discusses several aspects and properties of approved marine natural products derived from ascidian sources (phylum Chordata, subphylum Tunicata) and/or their deduced analogues including their biosynthetic origin, (bio)chemical preclinical assessments and known efficacy-safety profiles, clinical status in trials, but also translational developments, opportunities and final conclusions. The review also describes the preclinical assessments of a large number of other ascidian compounds that have not been involved in clinical trials yet.

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Mass spectrometry has been widely accepted as a confirmatory tool for the sensitive detection of undeclared presence of allergenic ingredients. Multiple methods have been developed so far, achieving different levels of sensitivity and robustness, still lacking harmonization of the analytical validation and impairing comparability of results. In this investigation, a quantitative method has been validated in-house for the determination of six allergenic ingredients (cow's milk, hen's egg, peanut, soybean, hazelnut, and almond) in a chocolate-based matrix.

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Industrial chicory ( var. ) and witloof ( var. ) are crops with an important economic value, mainly cultivated for inulin production and as a leafy vegetable, respectively.

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In early 2009 nicotine was unexpectedly detected in dried mushroom samples. As its origin has not yet been elucidated, this study addressed possible endogenous synthesis of nicotine. Therefore, fruiting bodies were grown in a representative and controlled (nicotine-free) setup.

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Chitin soil amendment is known to improve soil quality, plant growth and stress resilience, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. In this study, we monitored chitin's effect on lettuce physiology every two weeks through an eight-week growth period, analyzed the early transcriptional reprogramming and related metabolomic changes of lettuce, in response to crab chitin treatment in peat-based potting soil. In commercial growth conditions, chitin amendment still promoted lettuce growth, increased chlorophyll content, the number of leaves and crop head weight from week six.

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Background: Food allergen analysis is essential for the development of a risk-based approach for allergen management and labeling. MS has become a method of choice for allergen analysis, even if quantification remains challenging. Moreover, harmonization is still lacking between laboratories, while interlaboratory validation of analytical methods is necessary for such harmonization.

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A survey of plant-based wastes identified sunflower () bark extract (SBE), produced via twin-screw extrusion, as a potential biostimulant. The addition of SBE to Arabidopsis () seedlings cultured showed a dose-dependent response, with high concentrations causing severe growth inhibition. However, when priming seeds with SBE, a small but significant increase in leaf area was observed at a dose of 0.

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Background: Accurate food labeling is essential to protect allergic consumers. However, allergen contaminations may occur during the whole food production process. Reliable, sensitive, and robust methods for detecting multiple allergens in food are needed.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The design and production of test materials are essential for developing accurate food allergen analysis methods, as the food matrix and processing conditions can alter allergen structure and detectability.
  • - The ThRAll project focuses on creating a mass spectrometry method to quantify six common allergens (egg, milk, peanut, soy, hazelnut, and almond) in chocolate bars and broth powder using specific concentrations.
  • - Stability and homogeneity assessments of the incurred matrices showed that all allergens remained stable for 30 months, confirming their distribution and suitability for developing allergen detection methods.
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Background: Cow's milk allergy is one of the most reported food allergies in Europe. To help patients suffering from food allergies it is important to be able to detect milk in different foods. An analytical method that is gaining interest in the field of allergen detection is ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, where the analyte is a target peptide.

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Animal models indicate that butyrate might reduce motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease. Some dietary fibers are butyrogenic, but in Parkinson's disease patients their butyrate stimulating capacity is unknown. Therefore, we investigated different fiber supplements' effects on short-chain fatty acid production, along with potential underlying mechanisms, in Parkinson's patients and age-matched healthy controls.

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The presence of plant toxins and/or cyanotoxins in food supplements implies consumer health risks. Therefore, a targeted ultra-high performance liquid chromatographic-tandem mass spectrometric method to detect/quantify 25 toxins simultaneously in food supplement formulations was developed and validated. Full validation for tablets/powders and secondary validation for a liquid and soft gel capsule indicated that most compounds were efficiently extracted (≥ 75%), while others were only partly extracted (18 - 61%).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluates the tool PredRet for predicting retention times (RTs) of plant food bioactive metabolites across various chromatographic systems (CSs) in untargeted metabolomics.
  • It involved a shared dataset of 467 compounds from 30 different families, and found that PredRet achieved a median prediction error ranging from 0.03 to 0.76 minutes, demonstrating high accuracy in external validation tests.
  • The results suggest that successful RT prediction is influenced by the type of liquid chromatography gradient and the number of compounds measured, while encouraging the metabolomics community to contribute RT data to enhance PredRet’s effectiveness as an open-access tool.
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Peptide marker identification is an important step in development of a mass spectrometry method for multiple allergen detection, since specificity, robustness and sensitivity of the overall analytical method will depend on the reliability of the proteotypic peptides. As part of the development of a multi-analyte reference method, discovery analysis of two incurred food matrices has been undertaken to select the most reliable peptide markers. Six allergenic ingredients (milk, egg, peanut, soybean, hazelnut, and almond) were incurred into either chocolate or broth powder matrix.

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By-products of Belgian endive represent an interesting yet underutilised source of dietary fibre (DF). Dietary fibre concentrates (DFC) that are low in sugar and neutral in taste are sought by the food industry to increase DF content and improve texture in food products. The aim was to set up a biorefinery process to produce DFC from forced roots of Belgian endive (DFC-BE) and characterise the resulting product.

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Mass spectrometry-based methods coupled with stable isotope dilution have become effective and widely used methods for the detection and quantification of food allergens. Current methods target signature peptides resulting from proteolytic digestion of proteins of the allergenic ingredient. The choice of appropriate stable isotope-labelled internal standard is crucial, given the diversity of encountered food matrices which can affect sample preparation and analysis.

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Peptide marker identification is one of the most important steps in the development of a mass spectrometry (MS) based method for allergen detection, since the robustness and sensitivity of the overall analytical method will strictly depend on the reliability of the proteotypic peptides tracing for each allergen. The European legislation in place issues the mandatory labelling of fourteen allergenic ingredients whenever used in different food formulations. Among these, six allergenic ingredients, namely milk, egg, peanut, soybean, hazelnut and almond, can be prioritized in light of their higher occurrence in food recalls for undeclared presence with serious risk decision.

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The interest of using LC-MS/MS as a method for detection of allergens in food is growing. In such methods, peptides are used as biomarkers for the detection and quantification of the allergens. The selection of good biomarker peptides is of high importance to develop a specific, universal and sensitive method.

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