Center of Food and Fermentation Technologies sensory and flavor science expert Sirli Rosenvald will defend her PhD thesis “Application of Gas Chromatography-Olfactometry (GC-O) and Correlation with Sensory Analysis”. Date and location: 24.11.2017, 15:00 TUT Natural Sciences building SCI-109 (Akadeemia tee 15)
Aroma is a very important characteristic of food, as it is having the main influence on how people perceive its quality. Aroma molecules have often rather low detection
threshold which makes the detection and quantification of specific compounds in
various matrixes a challenging task. Classical instrumental detectors may fail to assess
the aroma profile of food in the manner that is similar enough to sensory perception of
human assessor. Therefore, gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O) is a useful
technique combining instrumental separation technique and human assessor as a
detector. Although, GC-O enables to receive aroma profile of the samples with good
sensitivity, it is coupled with different challenges. Humans, as assessors bring
subjectivity and flaws caused by the variation in sensitivity between the panellists and
inconstancy within the different runs of the same panellist.
Statistical methods are widely used in different disciplines to help extract valuable
information and discover patterns in data matrices invisible for human sight. As the
literature on methodological aspects on GC-O analysis as well as the published
research by using GC-O methods together with chemometric techniques is limited, this
thesis aims to bring some new insights to the possibilities of applicability of GC-O for
different scientific objectives.
Supervisors: Toomas Paalme and senior scientist Kristel Vene (TUT)
Opponents:
professor Andy Taylor (Nottingham University, UK)
Dr Mari Sandell (Turu University, Finland)
PhD is published here.