This review provides an overview of traceability studies performed to date (April 2009) for olive oils. Special emphasis has been made on the botanical origin because high-quality monovarietal olive oils have been recently introduced on the markets and their quality control requires the development of new and powerful analytical tools as well as new regulations to avoid fraud to consumers. Several parameters with discriminant power have been used for olive oil traceability according to the olive variety used in the production of the oil. They have been considered as traceability markers to the botanical origin and classified, in this work, as compositional and genetical markers.

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A portable capillary electrophoresis instrument featuring an automated, robust, valve-based injection system was developed. This significantly facilitates operation in the field compared to previous injection approaches. These generally required delicate manual operations which are difficult to perform outside the laboratory environment. The novel system relies on pressurized air for solution delivery and a micromembrane pump for sample aspiration. Contactless conductivity detection was employed for its versatility and low power requirement. The instrument has a compact design, with all components arranged in a briefcase with dimensions of 45 × 35 × 15 cm (w × d × h) and a weight of about 8 kg. It can operate continuously for 9 h in the battery-powered mode. Depending on the task at hand, the injection system allows easy optimization for high separation efficiency, for fast separations, or for low limits of detection. To illustrate these features, the separation of four anions within 16 s is demonstrated as well as the determination of nitrite below 1 μM. The determination of phosphate at a sewage treatment plant was carried out to demonstrate a field application.

The ability to unequivocally identify a gunshot residue (GSR) when a firearm is discharged is a very important and crucial part of crime scene investigation. To date, the great majority of the analyses have focused on the inorganic components of GSR, but the introduction of "lead-free" or "nontoxic" ammunitions makes it difficult to prevent false negatives. This study introduces a fast methodology for the organic analysis of GSR using Raman spectroscopy. Six different types of ammunition were fired at short distances into cloth targets, and the Raman spectra produced by the GSR were measured and compared with the spectra from the unfired gunpowder ammunition. The GSR spectrum shows high similarity to the spectrum of the unfired ammunition, allowing the GSR to be traced to the ammunition used. Additionally, other substances that might be found on the victim's, shooter's, or suspect's clothes and might be confused with GSR, such as sand, dried blood, or black ink from a common ballpoint pen, were analyzed to test the screening capability of the Raman technique. The results obtained evidenced that Raman spectroscopy is a useful screening tool when fast analysis is desired and that little sample preparation is required for the analysis of GSR evidence.

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Body fluids are evidence of great interest in forensics because they allow identification of individuals through the study of DNA. After reviewing the tests and the methods that are currently being used by forensic practitioners for the detection of body fluids (e.g. blood, semen, saliva, vaginal fluid, urine and sweat), and after showing their main drawbacks and limitations, this work focuses on the review of emerging spectrometric techniques applied for the forensic analysis of body fluids. These techniques include the use of ultraviolet-visible, infrared (IR), Raman, X-ray fluorescence and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry for investigating blood, semen, saliva, urine, vaginal fluid or sweat. Although all these spectrometric techniques seem to have a high potential to differentiate body fluids prior to DNA extraction, IR and Raman spectroscopy have shown the most promising results for discriminating stains from body fluids.

Sensitive chiral analysis by CE: An updateA general view of the different strategies used in the last years to enhance the detection sensitivity in chiral analysis by CE is provided in this article. With this purpose and in order to update the previous review by García-Ruiz et al., the articles appeared on this subject from January 2005 to March 2007 are considered. Three were the main strategies employed to increase the detection sensitivity in chiral analysis by CE: (i) the use of off-line sample treatment techniques, (ii) the employment of in-capillary preconcentration techniques based on electrophoretic principles, and (iii) the use of alternative detection systems to the widely employed on-column UV-Vis absorption detection. Combinations of two or three of the above-mentioned strategies gave rise to adequate concentration detection limits up to 10 210 M enabling enantiomer analysis in a variety of real samples including complex biological matrices.