Lidia Montero

My research career has been focused in the field of Food Science and Food analysis, in particular, in the development of analytical methods that answer important socio-economic problems related to food quality and food bioactivity. To achieve this objective, I have applied advanced analytical techniques like chromatography and mass spectrometry, comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LCxLC), and ion mobility (LC-IM-MS). My main research lines, where I have shown a high competence, are: - Food quality. My contribution in this discipline is related to the fight against counterfeiting food practices and food fraud. My analytical background has been a key piece in the development of analytical methods optimized to characterize the chemical profile of samples with important socio-economic impact and to find potential metabolite markers that can be used to avoid adulteration and misleading food practices. For instance, I developed an LCxLC method for the authentication of a high-quality product granted with a PDO by the UE, namely the PDO “licorice from Calabria”. Besides, I have optimized other LCxLC and LC-IM-MS methods for the characterization and differentiation of different food products. - Food bioactivity. My main goal and contribution to food bioactivity has been the development of green extraction techniques to obtain pure fractions of bioactive compounds present in food and their chemical characterization as well as the evaluation of their in-vitro activity. This strategy, which I have carried out in several works, meets the requirements of new trends in novel and functional foods. There is a need to correlate the potential bioactivities of food with the specific food ingredient or families of ingredients responsible for those bioactivities. I developed advanced analytical methods to provide the maximum separation power of the bioactive food fractions, for example, to correlate the anti-carcinogenic activity against colon cancer cells of brown algae with specific phenolic compounds named phlorotannins.