Abstract
The power of foodomics as a discipline that is now broadly used for quality assurance of food products and adulteration identification, as well as for determining the safety of food, is presented. Concerning sample preparation and application, maintenance of highly sophisticated instruments for both high-performance and high-throughput techniques, and analysis and data interpretation, special attention has to be paid to the development of skilled analysts. The obtained data shall be integrated under a strong bioinformatics environment. Modern mass spectrometry is an extremely powerful analytical tool since it can provide direct qualitative and quantitative information about a molecule of interest from only a minute amount of sample. Quality of this information is influenced by the sample preparation procedure, the type of mass spectrometer used and the analyst's skills. Technical advances are bringing new instruments of increased sensitivity, resolution and speed to the market. Other methods presented here give additional information and can be used as complementary tools to mass spectrometry or for validation of obtained results. Genomics and transcriptomics, as well as affinity-based methods, still have a broad use in food analysis. Serious drawbacks of some of them, especially the affinity-based methods, are the cross-reactivity between similar molecules and the influence of complex food matrices. However, these techniques can be used for pre-screening in order to reduce the large number of samples. Great progress has been made in the application of bioinformatics in foodomics. These developments enabled processing of large amounts of generated data for both identification and quantification, and for corresponding modeling.
Highlights
Traditional food analysis as a discipline of food science was developed together with other basic sectors of analytical chemistry [1]
Of unknown origin, the fatal outbreak of food poisoning caused by Shiga toxin-producing pathogen bacterium Escherichia coli O104:H4 during the year 2011 in both Germany and France originated from food imported from a developing country [7,8]
We have recently presented a comprehensive overview of some omic data repositories [9] that are in a process of constant improvement and completion [171], and bioinformatic research is without doubt a crucial tool in the whole field of foodomics [4,9,18]
Summary
The power of foodomics as a discipline that is broadly used for quality assurance of food products and adulteration identification, as well as for determining the safety of food, is presented. Modern mass spectrometry is an extremely powerful analytical tool since it can provide direct qualitative and quantitative information about a molecule of interest from only a minute amount of sample. Quality of this information is influenced by the sample preparation procedure, the type of mass spectrometer used and the analyst’s skills. Serious drawbacks of some of them, especially the affinity-based methods, are the cross-reactivity between similar molecules and the influence of complex food matrices These techniques can be used for pre-screening in order to reduce the large number of samples.
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