Metabonomic profiling, using High Performance Liquid Chromatography Quadrupole Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-Q-ToF-MS), was adopted in this study to uncover differences in the small molecule profiles of egg yolks, between two sets of six eggs that were stored at 5 °C and 23 °C for five weeks. Choline, a compound that has previously been shown to have potential use as a biomarker of egg age, was observed to have a significantly lower abundance in the yolks of eggs that were stored at 5 °C for five weeks compared to eggs stored at 23 °C for the same length of time. A follow-up targeted study observed that the previously discovered trend of increasing choline concentration in egg yolk, with increasing egg age, is not repeatable when the eggs are stored at 5 °C rather than 23 °C. It concluded that, by refrigerating eggs at 5 °C, the accurate prediction of egg age using choline as a biomarker can be prevented.
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