Meat is a vital source of high-quality proteins, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals essential for human health. Growing demand for healthier lifestyles and technological advancements has heightened the focus on meat products, whose quality depends on meat protein properties, such as texture, water holding capacity (WHC), and structural integrity. Non-thermal processing technologies are gaining attention for enhancing the gelation properties of meat protein gels (MPGs) by optimizing solubilization, denaturation, and aggregation while preserving nutritional and sensory qualities and avoiding the drawbacks of thermal treatments. This review focuses on advanced non-thermal processing techniques, including high-pressure processing (HPP), pulsed electric fields (PEFs), ultrasound, and cold plasma, and their impact on MPGs. It also examines vibrational spectroscopy methods, such as Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy, for non-invasive analysis of MPGs. The integration of these approaches with hyperspectral imaging and machine learning is also explored as a tool to improve quality control and assessment.

Background: Food safety remains a global concern due to biological and chemical contaminants, including adulterants, pathogens, antibiotic residues, and pesticides. Traditional detection methods are accurate but limited by time requirements, complex sample preparation, high costs, and poor field applicability. Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) offers non-destructive analysis with low detection limits and high specificity, yet conventional SERS substrates face challenges with reproducibility, nanoparticle aggregation, and sensitivity in food matrices. Hydrogels have emerged as supporting materials for SERS due to their water content, tunable porosity, flexibility, and ability to entrap plasmonic nanostructures. Scope and Approach: This review examines recent advances in hydrogel-integrated SERS platforms for food safety applications. The three-dimensional structure of hydrogels enables homogeneous distribution of metal nanoparticles, prevents aggregation, and offers analyte enrichment. We analyze material design, functionalization strategies, and how hydrogel properties—crosslinking density, porosity, surface charge, and nanoparticle distribution—influence SERS performance in food matrices. Key Findings and Conclusions: Hydrogel-integrated SERS platforms demonstrate superior performance in detecting various food contaminants—including pesticides, adulterants, and additives—in real food matrices, often achieving detection limits in the nanomolar to picomolar range, depending on the analyte and substrate design. Current limitations include storage stability concerns, batch-to-batch variability, and regulatory acceptance hurdles. Future research directions should focus on multiplex detection capabilities, integration with smart sensing technologies, and industrial scalability to facilitate practical deployment in global food safety monitoring across diverse supply chains.

Background/Objectives: Diel reprogramming of central metabolism is well documented in vascular plants; whether diatoms organize carbon and nitrogen metabolism in the same way is unknown for want of absolutely quantified metabolite time series covering a complete light/dark cycle. Methods: Wild-type Phaeodactylum tricornutum was grown under a 12 h light/12 h dark cycle and sampled at the 3rd, 6th, and 12th h of both phases (n = 3 per time point; 18 samples). Ninety metabolites were detected and absolutely quantified by targeted liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS), and the 72 metabolites were retained for downstream analysis after excluding those with extensive missingness; time effects were tested by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) (p < 0.05). Results: Forty metabolites (55.6%) changed significantly over time and clustered into five diel patterns. The citrate branch of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle declined in the light and recovered in the dark, malate and fumarate peaked at early dark (D3), and α-ketoglutarate reached its minimum at D3. Photorespiratory intermediates were generally higher in the light, except glyoxylate (D3 peak). Glutamate-family pools bottomed out at the end of the light phase; ornithine fell monotonically, the largest drop among measured amino acids. Conclusions: Central carbon and nitrogen metabolism of P. tricornutum undergoes phased reallocation over the light/dark cycle. Pool dynamics suggest a diel, bidirectional exchange of carbon skeletons between the TCA cycle and amino acid metabolism via the α-ketoglutarate node, with early-dark four-carbon (C4) accumulation coinciding with amino acid catabolic replenishment (carbon origin awaits ¹³C tracing). Photorespiratory intermediates followed a light-high, dark-low pattern consistent with suppression, but not abolition, of photorespiration by the CO₂-concentrating mechanism (CCM). This dataset provides a metabolite-level, absolutely quantified reference for diatom diel metabolism.