IGFS recently completed its move into a purpose-built, new £40million building (above), which it shares with the School of Biological Sciences.

The new site will be a key driver for the sustained development of the agrifood and life-sciences sectors in Northern Ireland and boasts a superb teaching and research environment for 750 students and 170 staff across areas such as agriculture, food science, food safety, food security, disease/infection biology, diagnostics, waste management, ecosystems and the environment.

It also contains the ASSET Technology Centre - a leading analytical chemistry and mass spectrometry research hub, which hosts the Centre for Excellence in Agriculture and Food Integrity, in partnership with the UK's National Measurement Laboratory. The centre is also listed as a 'Centre of Expertise' by the Food Authenticity Network, a UK DEFRA initiative.

ASSET Technology Centre - at the heart of IGFS

The ASSET ('Assured, Safe and Traceable') centre is a lynchpin of IGFS and hosts the Centre for Excellence in Agriculture and Food Integrity, in partnership with the UK's National Measurement Laboratory.

The UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently designated IGFS an IAEA Collaborating Centre, recognising the global reach of the ASSET centre in food safety, authenticity and traceability.

ASSET is also listed as a 'Centre of Expertise' by the Food Authenticity Network - a Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) initiative.

It provides leading platforms to facilitate increasingly rapid identification of feed and food contamination and adulteration. The equipment is among the most specialist in any university and was possible due to the generous support of Innovate UK (via CIEL Livestock) and European Regional Development Fund (Invest NI) as well as some instrument manufacturers.

The mass spectrometry element features a range of hyphenated MS instruments. Various LC-MS/MS and GC-MS are available for tailored measurements of predetermined analytes such as toxins, pesticides or targeted metabolomic, as well as high resolution accurate mass instruments (QTof) coupled to UPLC for non-targeted metabolomic analysis or equipped with an Ambient ionisation source such as REIMS, DESI or DART.

Equipment includes: MASS SPECTOMETRY - REIMS research system, incorporating ‘iKnife’, DART (Direct Analysis in Real Time) ionisation couple to single quadrupole detector, UPLC-QTof with associated processing software workflow suite; SPECTROSCOPY INSTRUMENTATION - FTIR (Fourier Transform Infra-red); NIR (Near Infrared) in benchtop and portable format; Raman.

Also, ASSET is now at the forefront of handheld spectroscopy applications which can be used anywhere in complex supply chains. In October 2019, ASSET was awarded ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation (lab UKAS accreditation number 10515) for herbs and spice authenticity testing, an industry 'gold standard' that is extremely rare for a university lab.

The agrifood industry is the biggest employer in the Northern Ireland manufacturing sector, providing jobs for over 100,000 people and contributing more than £5.5 billion pa to the local economy. Northern Irish agrifood has a reputation for being high-quality, due to a strong agricultural tradition and relatively short supply chains.

The future prosperity of Northern Ireland therefore relies heavily on the agrifood sector – this has become even more apparent in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis and Brexit, both of which are having seismic effects on food supply, food integrity and food fraud.

The ability of IGFS and the School of Biological Sciences to support the agrifood industry – not only providing highly educated graduate, post-graduate and post-doctoral professionals, but world-leading research and lab facilities to carry out food authenticity testing and thereby promote food security – has never been more important.