Food Metabolomics: A New Frontier in Food Analysis and its Application to Understanding Fermented Foods

Abstract

The emergence of food metabolomics, otherwise known as foodomics, has opened new frontiers and possibilities for scientists to characterize and simultaneously determine and obtain the comprehensive profile of the food metabolome. Qualitative and quantitative determinations of this metabolome offer insights into the underlying processes involved and details about the content of the food analytes. This had seemed technically challenging and impossible over time, but can now be done due to the advent of sophisticated analytical equipment and chemometric tools. The application of this technique offers enormous opportunities to obtain detailed information that can be correlated to various properties, functionalities and potentials in fermented foods. This chapter thus evaluated and documented studies presented in the literature on the food metabolomics study of fermented foods, with a view of appraising its prospects, applications and subsequent utilization in the study of fermented foods.

Lactobacillus plantarum with Functional Properties: An Approach to Increase Safety and Shelf-Life of Fermented Foods

“…Food metabolomics or “foodomics” has been practiced and adopted in the study of different foods/fermented food products in the literature [ 117 ]. Specifically, in fermented food systems, it is practically used to estimate and monitor the changes occurring during the fermentation process and also to investigate the composition of fermented foods [ 118 ]. At the beginning, the composite/heterogenous components in fermented food need to be separated/simplified prior to detection.…”

African Sorghum-Based Fermented Foods: Past, Current and Future Prospects

“…The advent of the "omics" technologies (metabolomics, genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, foodomics, volatilomics and proteomics) have also opened up possibilities of better understanding and broader perspectives into the quality of fermented foods [8,64,91,[193][194][195][196]. These big data bioinformatic techniques have provided tools to control, monitor, modify or improve such products.…”

“…By providing a broader understanding of the microbiota of fermented foods, this would effectively guide in the selection of starter cultures for an improved fermentation process. Likewise, metabolomics involves the analysis of metabolites within a sample interest to answer specific biological questions that would further provide insight or assist in the selection of strains, process, substrate [8,195,197]. Through these technologies, and the earlier aforementioned ones, new strains of starter cultures with desirable functionalities could be identified and purified for use in fermentation.…”

“…Amongst all the available food processing techniques, fermentation is an age-long process, known to improve nutritional qualities, palatability and consumer appeal [8][9][10][11]. Derived fermented food products continue to constitute an important part of our daily diet and are estimated to provide about a third of world food supplies [12].…”

From untargeted metabolomics to the multiple reaction monitoring‐based quantification of polyphenols in chocolates from different geographical areas

“…Metabolomics belongs to the omics science able to offer scientists the privilege to acquire a comprehensive and detailed knowledge of molecular composition of any matrix, including food 1 . The great applicability of metabolomics makes this approach feasible to manage tricky problems in several areas related to food science, for example, from the quality control of raw material along the production chain up to the analysis of finished products as well as for food frauds or nutritional/nutraceutical applications.…”