Crops and Tasty, Nutritious Food – How Can Metabolomics Help?

Abstract

Food quality, security and safety have become topics of considerable recent interest. With a rapidly growing world population, entailing an everexpanding requirement for food, and with the global consumer making higher and better-informed demands on our crop and food producers, much attention is being given to how we can meet all these growing needs. Crop growers and food processors alike are already looking at state-of-the-art technologies such as metabolomics as a source of new inroads into the generation of detailed knowledge on the biochemical composition of crop products and how they change during transport, storage and industrial processing. All the steps in the food production chain, from the moment the plant breeder makes the first cross to the canning factory delivering to the supermarket distributor, have potentially significant influence on the quality of the final product the consumer places on the kitchen table. Metabolomics of crop plants and plant products is already being widely applied and is generating new information on the complexity of food composition. In this chapter, some of the main subjects of recent research, concerning both fresh and processed materials, are covered. Emphasis has been laid on technological

Supramolecular Luminescent Sensors

“…The detection of analytes that can compromise food safety and/or quality is particularly important from a variety of public health objectives, including ensuring the health of the population that consumes the food, developing methods to transport food safely from the point of origin to the point of consumption, and reducing the waste of food in developed countries and the food shortages in developing ones . Analytes that are of interest for such detection include a variety of pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella and E.…”

“…Food-Related Applications. The detection of analytes that can compromise food safety 1668 and/or quality is particularly important from a variety of public health objectives, 1669 including ensuring the health of the population that consumes the food, 1670 developing methods to transport food safely from the point of origin to the point of consumption, 1671 and reducing the waste of food in developed countries 1672 and the food shortages in developing ones. 1673 Analytes that are of interest for such detection include a variety of pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella 1674 and E. coli 1675 that can contaminate the food supply; small molecule analytes such as ethylene that are indicators of fruit ripening; 927 and oxygen that can indicate that a sealed container has been opened and that food spoilage will be accelerated.…”

The potential of rice to offer solutions for malnutrition and chronic diseases

“…Metabolomics is helping to increase this coverage, but much work is still needed if we are to link e.g. key nutrient traits with mixtures of known metabolites ([ Fernie and Keurentjes 2011 ];[ Stewart et al 2011 ]).…”

Multi-platform metabolomics analyses of a broad collection of fragrant and non-fragrant rice varieties reveals the high complexity of grain quality characteristics

“…Metabolomics is an analytical technology focused on profiling myriad of small metabolites present in biological samples (Hall 2006 ; Saito et al 2006 ). As an untargeted approach, it has the potential to play a key role in defining better what is meant by grain quality, and the technology can help identify those components which either positively or negatively influence sensory characteristics without any great requirement for prior knowledge (Stewart et al 2011 ). A range of approaches has been developed, generally centred around combinations of separation (e.g.…”