AGROSENSOR project
The AGROSENSOR project, which Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech - University of Liège is one of the scientific partners, has just been accepted.
AGROSENSOR is a "WAGRALIM competitiveness cluster" project financed to the tune of €1.3 million and whose project leader is the company B-sense. The project partners are, on the university side, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech - University of Liège (Marie-Laure Fauconnier), UMons, UCL and Materia Nova and, on the company side, Unisensor, Walagri and Lovenfosse.
The AGROSENSOR project aims to develop new innovative gas sensors using sensitive materials based on molecular fingerprint polymers (MIP) that would allow the development of rapid diagnostic tools in the agri-food sector. The detection of specific anomaly indicator gases (volatile organic compounds markers) allows problems (fungal contamination, appearance of unwanted odours, etc.) to be detected more quickly without using complex analytical methods. This is an innovative technology and there are many potential applications and sectors that potentially require such devices: early detection of post-harvest diseases for cereals, fruit and vegetables stored in bulk, early detection of the presence of insects in stored foodstuffs, early detection of diseases in the field, plant health monitoring of foodstuffs during transport (intelligent containers), etc...
Within the framework of this project, two contexts have been selected to develop sensor demonstrators to address two crucial issues in the Belgian, European and global agri-food sector: the detection of boar taint in pigs in slaughterhouses and the detection of mycotoxins at cereal reception (Fusarium graminearum contamination on soft wheat).
The first problem concerns the sorting of uncastrated pig carcasses, a significant percentage of which is unfit for consumption without processing (or intended for export to certain countries) because of a boar taint smell that develops during cooking. At present, there is no fast and reliable technique for sorting at the slaughterhouse. For the time being, the proportion of uncastrated pigs arriving at the slaughterhouse is still low and the detection of the quality defect is carried out manually by an operator trained specifically to detect odorous carcasses by olfaction. However, the method remains subjective and varies from one operator to another (accuracy <60%). The upcoming ban on pig castration in Belgium but also very soon in other European countries will make this issue even more crucial in the short term.
In the cereal sector, the detection of mycotoxins that may be present as soon as they are placed in silos (contamination in the field) or develop during storage remains a critical issue. Existing detection methods are either long and costly because they are based on complex analytical techniques (LC-MS-MS : about 350 € per sample, ELISA tests : about 50 € per sample), or very inaccurate (tigettes, 12 € per sample). In Europe, the main problems are encountered with common wheat, where the refusal of goods and the downgrading of batches from the FOOD to the FEED chain can represent, in some years, 50% of the production volume. Early detection of problem (or potentially problem) batches when receiving cereals can allow rapid action to be taken to redirect batches or change storage conditions (aeration) to minimise the economic impact. Mycotoxins are not volatile compounds but their production by fungal strains has been shown to be associated with the specific production of some specific VOCs. The objective is therefore to develop connected sensors for the detection of these volatile organic compounds (VOC markers) that will allow rapid diagnosis without the preparation of complex samples and analyses in the laboratory.
