Standardization of the Steigbild Method

ABSTRACT The growing organic market demands methods which can describe food quality within the organic system. With the Steigbild technique, patterns are produced on thin-layer chromatographic paper and evaluated as a fingerprint of the sample as a whole. To be applied in routine analysis the method has to be standardized. After the laboratory process was documented and a standardized visual pattern evaluation method was developed and applied, the method was standardized for selected carrot and wheat samples, which is described here. For standardization, several factors of influence were tested and the reproducibility between three different laboratories in the EU was investigated. The method is able to differentiate patterns from samples from different farming treatments and processing steps. Farm pairs of organic and conventional farm management can be distinguished as statistically significant and classified according to the farming system (carrots, wheat). This represents a significant step forward beyond the state of the art. This work was performed in a collaboration between the University of Kassel (Germany) the Louis Bolk Institute (LBI, The Netherlands) and the Biodynamic Research Association Denmark (BRAD, Denmark).

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