Speaker
Description
X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) is gaining rapidly growing interest in environmental and food-related research because it provides element-specific, atomic-scale insight into complex, real-world materials—a capability few other techniques can offer. This makes XAS uniquely suited for studying contaminants, nutrients, catalysts, and structural changes in biological, agro-food matrices, and health-related tissues.
In this work, several examples are presented to highlight this approach:
1 Agro-food Systems: Advancing food traceability, characterizing functional and premium food matrices, and identifying early-stage biomarkers in plant pathologies.
2 Biomedical & Health Sciences: Elucidating biomineralization pathways, including the ultrastructural analysis of dental tissues, nephrolithiasis (kidney stone formation), and myositis ossificans (muscle calculi).
These case studies underscore the necessity of a multi-modal and multi-scale framework that integrates high-resolution Electron Microscopy (EM) with synchrotron-based Macro/Micro-Spectroscopy and Micro-Diffraction. Ultimately, we demonstrate how such integrated instrumentation is critical for correlated, non-destructive investigations—combining atomic/subatomic morphological resolution with micrometer-scale chemical and structural characterization—to advance a state-of-the-art multi-analytical approach capable of bridging the gap between morphology and localized chemical species.