Metabolomics approaches for resolving and harnessing chemical diversity in grapes, yeast and wine

Abstract

Metabolomics is the scientific study of the unique chemical fingerprints that result from specific biochemical processes. It enables the comprehensive detection and quantification of small molecules that are intermediates or end‐products of metabolism in a biological sample, such as a grape or yeast. The metabolomics approach also provides for a holistic characterisation of complex chemical transformations and oxidation reactions during winemaking, ageing and transport. The development of metabolomics has made major advances in the last two decades. Improved chromatographic techniques for separation of polar metabolites and enhanced sensitivity and selectivity of nuclear mass resonance and mass spectrometric instrumentation now enable detection and quantification of hundreds of metabolites in a single analysis. New bioinformatics tools and statistics capabilities are available which are key to efficiently analysing and annotating comprehensive datasets. This review provides an overview of analytical methods for untargeted profiling, biomarker discovery and targeted analysis of non‐volatile and volatile metabolites. It summarises bioinformatics tools for data processing, data mining and metabolite identification and explores metabolomics approaches which have been successfully employed to comprehensively analyse, annotate and understand the broad chemical diversity in grapes, yeast and wine. It also describes opportunities for the application of metabolomics in grape and wine science and provides an outlook about further development needs and emerging trends.

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

“…However, these pre-analytical steps are time-consuming, arduous and often can cause loss of analytes, which is not appropriate for an unbiased profiling approach [86,87,94]. Details on sample preparation of grapes, wines and related microorganisms are provided in Lloyd, Johnson and Herderich [38].…”

“…Based on this published research, some of the most interesting applications are discussed below mainly by highlighting those published in last five years. Readers are also recommended to consult three other review articles where the potential applications of metabolomics in different aspects of grape and wine research have been discussed [35,37,38]. Limited commercial libraries [124,125] Interestingly, approximately 70% of these articles were published within last five years, which clearly shows that grape and wine researchers are more interested in adopting metabolomics either in a targeted or in an untargeted manner ( Figure 2).…”

“…Based on this published research, some of the most interesting applications are discussed below mainly by highlighting those published in last five years. Readers are also recommended to consult three other review articles where the potential applications of metabolomics in different aspects of grape and wine research have been discussed [35,37,38].…”

“…Within this time period, it has proven to be an important and powerful approach and has been used to analyze metabolites in agricultural (and food) products in both targeted and untargeted ways [16,[29][30][31][32][33]. Like other food and agricultural products, the introduction of metabolomics in grape and wine research also garnered considerable attraction, mostly as a hypothesis-generating tool [30,[34][35][36][37][38][39]. The main aim of this review is to re-visit the available published literature where either targeted or untargeted metabolomics has been applied to study grapes, wines and microorganisms associated with winemaking.…”

HS-SPME-GC-MS Analyses of Volatiles in Plant Populations – Quantitating Compound × Individual Matrix Effects

“…A challenge associated with SPME, however, is its high susceptibility to matrix effects, including plant matrices [18,19]. For example, for a range of volatiles, SPME-GC-MS responses were reported to decrease by 2-12-fold in a tomato matrix [15].…”