Abstract
Bioactive compounds present in plant-based foods, and their metabolites derived from gut microbiota and endogenous metabolism, represent thousands of chemical structures of potential interest for human nutrition and health. State-of-the-art analytical methodologies, including untargeted metabolomics based on high-resolution mass spectrometry, are required for the profiling of these compounds in complex matrices, including plant food materials and biofluids. The aim of this project was to compare the analytical coverage of untargeted metabolomics methods independently developed and employed in various European platforms. In total, 56 chemical standards representing the most common classes of bioactive compounds spread over a wide chemical space were selected and analyzed by the participating platforms (n = 13) using their preferred untargeted method. The results were used to define analytical criteria for a successful analysis of plant food bioactives. Furthermore, they will serve as a basis for an optimized consensus method.
Highlights
Plant bioactive compounds, or phytochemicals, represent up to thousands of plant-synthetized chemicals that do not act as nutrients, but may have other biological activities in vivo after plant consumption
Liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC–MS) provides high mass accuracy, dynamic range and sensitivity due to advances in the instrumentation during the past decade, such as the development of ion cyclotron resonance (ICR), Orbitrap and quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF) mass analyzers
The chemical structures selected for the study were plotted based on their molecular mass and calculated log P value to visualize the chemical space of the phytochemical families represented (Figure 1)
Summary
Phytochemicals, represent up to thousands of plant-synthetized chemicals that do not act as nutrients, but may have other biological activities in vivo after plant consumption. The amount and diversity of these compounds present in food highly depend on genetic and environmental factors of the raw material, as well as food processing. Such factors include the species or cultivar, soil and climate conditions, storage conditions, fermentation, and the food preparation process. A better knowledge about the effects and mechanisms of action of phytochemicals in vivo is necessary in order to develop new products and encourage the consumption of diets that are known to be healthy. Gas chromatography (GC–MS) has a clear advantage over LC–MS in being highly reproducible regarding retention times and mass spectral fingerprints of compounds [11]; the requirement of derivatization to increase the volatility of most analytes limits the usability of this technology to mainly primary metabolites [10,12]
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