Chemistry and sensing in the coffee industry

Within the coffee industry, the family of chlorogenic acids (CGAs) are key components, due to their well-known biological effects and their influence on coffee flavour and aroma;  there is a strong interest in developing innovative approaches towards the detection and quantification of chlorogenic acids in order to understand how their concentration varies during all the steps of the coffee production, from the green beans to roasting and brewing. Currently these data are only obtained by relying on the use of expensive equipment, such as HPLC and LC-MS. An additional challenge in this area is being able to identify and quantify the different CGAs present in the mixtures. The advances in the area of nanomaterials and nanotechnology have prompted the use of such materials for potential application in an industrial setting. We have been working on the synthesis and characterisation of a series of acrylamide-based nanogels able to bind CGAs as a result of a self-assembling approach. A computational approach was used initially to select the most promising functional monomers (FMs), which were then synthesised and their interaction with 5-caffeoylquinic acid (5-CQA) evaluated. This work was carried out collaboratively between Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the University of Trieste.