Grape and Wine Metabolomics to Develop New Insights Using Untargeted and Targeted Approaches

Abstract

Chemical analysis of grape juice and wine has been performed for over 50 years in a targeted manner to determine a limited number of compounds using Gas Chromatography, Mass-Spectrometry (GC-MS) and High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). Therefore, it only allowed the determination of metabolites that are present in high concentration, including major sugars, amino acids and some important carboxylic acids. Thus, the roles of many significant but less concentrated metabolites during wine making process are still not known. This is where metabolomics shows its enormous potential, mainly because of its capability in analyzing over 1000 metabolites in a single run due to the recent advancements of high resolution and sensitive analytical instruments. Metabolomics has predominantly been adopted by many wine scientists as a hypothesis-generating tool in an unbiased and non-targeted way to address various issues, including characterization of geographical origin (terroir) and wine yeast metabolic traits, determination of biomarkers for aroma compounds, and the monitoring of growth developments of grape vines and grapes. The aim of this review is to explore the published literature that made use of both targeted and untargeted metabolomics to study grapes and wines and also the fermentation process. In addition, insights are also provided into many other possible avenues where metabolomics shows tremendous potential as a question-driven approach in grape and wine research.

Qualitative Factor-Based Comparison of NMR, Targeted and Untargeted GC-MS and LC-MS on the Metabolomic Profiles of Rioja and Priorat Red Wines

“…Though, NMR is limited as it is unable to detect metabolites that are present in very small concentrations. Nevertheless, it has been generally accepted that untargeted analysis is needed for a more comprehensive and holistic analysis [ 1 , 11 ]. The use of the kinetic correlations in time-dependent processes as wine ages can further contribute to metabolomic monitoring, discovery of new biomarkers, and metabolic network investigations.…”

Identification of putative chemical markers in white wine (Chasselas) related to nitrogen deficiencies in vineyards

“…In the past decade, the number of publications on grape and wine metabolomics has expanded dramatically. In their reviews, Cozzolino (2016) and Pinu (2018) demonstrated the importance of metabolomic approaches in grape and wine research. Such approaches have been used to compare the metabolomic profiles of different vine varieties (Arapitsas et al, 2020), as well as to study the plant metabolites' responses to abiotic stress, such as water stress (Pinasseau et al, 2017), and to investigate oenological techniques, such as sulfite addition (Roullier-Gall et al, 2017) and storage (Gougeon et al, 2019).…”

RNA-seq and metabolome revealed counter effect of chitosan against Botrytis cinerea on grape berries

“…The omic technologies: transcriptomic, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics are focused on genes, RNA, proteins, and metabolite [16]. RNA-sequencing is novel and deep-sequencing NGS technique used to acquire transcriptomic profiling.…”

“…Consequently, metabolomics allow the investigation of metabolites that are existing in higher concentration, mainly major some important carboxylic acids, amino acids, and sugars. Thus, the significant roles of many metabolites but less concentrated metabolites during growth and development is still need to investigate [16].…”