FOOD SCIENCE
STANDOUT
With more than 20 years of experience as a researcher,
mentor, and regulatory advisor, Dr. Jana Hajšlová has
stayed on the forefront of food safety by arming herself
with the most advanced tools available.
Organic nanoparticles, metabolomics,
fingerprinting, pesticides, mycotoxins…
and the list goes on. While this may
seem like a syllabus of the topics studied
in Prof. Jana Hajšlová’s Principles of
Food Safety course at the Institute of
Chemical Technology (ICT) in Prague,
this list is actually a small sampling of
the resumé of the professor. Since earning her Ph.D. at the Institute while
studying protein hydrolyzation,
The Importance of Instrumentation
Dr. Hajšlová and her team consistently
push the limits in the world of food
analysis by using leading-edge equip-
ment. She appreciates having the op-
portunity to work with instrumentation
that “other people just dream about,”
and feels that it is a key asset to at-
tracting talented students to her
lab. She comments, “Because
I have so many projects, very
good instrumentation, and
a very well-equipped
lab, I offer people
very good conditions
to focus on sci-
ence.” Several of her
recent projects have
involved work with
the Thermo Scientific
Exactive system, which
combines ultra-high-
performance liquid
chromatography
(U-HPLC) with an
Orbitrap-based mass
spectrometer (MS).
“It provides very
high resolution” says
Dr. Hajšlová, and in
comparison to older
instruments, has “in-
creased the detection limits because it
is very selective in detection.”
Thermo Scientific Exactive Benchtop Mass Spectrometer
Dr. Hajšlová has spent more than 20
years researching a wide range of food
safety issues. She has also bolstered
the discipline of food science significantly by mentoring more than 20
Ph.D. students, many of whom have
continued with significant positions
in the field. The result of these efforts
is that Dr. Hajšlová is not only one of
the biggest names in food safety, but
she is also highly networked with food
safety experts worldwide.
She continues, “It has very high-qual-ity software, which enables easy and
logical calibration.”
Mycotoxins—A Growing Problem
One area in which Dr. Hajšlová was able
to capitalize on the performance of the
Exactive TM LC-MS was the analysis of
mycotoxins. Mycotoxin presence and
newly emerging mycotoxins are growing
problems in Europe and other parts of
the world because of gradual changes in
crop production that are being induced
by global warming. Eventually, many of
these mycotoxins make their way into
foods such as bread, breakfast cereals,
and beer. “Beer,” says Dr. Hajšlová with
a smile in her voice, “is a very popular
alcoholic beverage in many countries in
Europe such as Belgium, the Czech Republic, Holland, Spain, and the U.K.” She
goes on to explain that, as a result, people
who drink a lot of beer are exposed to
significant concentrations of mycotoxins.
Some of these mycotoxins are concentrated during the malting process due to
deglucosylation. In Europe and elsewhere,
there are no standards defining what concentrations of mycotoxins are permissible
in beer. In this situation, Dr. Hajšlová
emphasizes, proper analysis is the key—if
food scientists know exactly what is in a
particular food, then regulators can make
sensible, data-based decisions about how
to control them.
In order to help generate needed data regarding mycotoxins, Dr. Hajšlová and her
team developed a method for the analysis
of 32 mycotoxins in beer, based on simple
sample preparation. Until now, the most
common, full spectral mass-spectrometric
approach has been the triple quadrupole
MS/MS or time-of-flight technology
(TOF-MS), with typical resolving power
of approx. 30,000 FWHM (full width
