Monitoring Food Quality by Microfluidic Electrophoresis, Gas Chromatography, and Mass Spectrometry Techniques:  Effects of Aquaculture on the Sea Bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)

Abstract

Monitoring food quality is a critical task for analytical chemistry and an important way to preserve human health. Fish is a valuable source of highly digestible proteins and contains large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins. Since the world's wild fish stocks are limited, farmed fish is nowadays proposed as an alternative to consumers. It is now emerging that the fish muscle protein content is assuming great importance from an aquaculture perspective. Many data have been collected on the physiology and biochemistry of fish muscle, but few proteomic studies are available on farmed fish. Application of proteomics to aquaculture may play a key role in the development of new farming strategies. In this paper, a proteomic approach based on SDS-PAGE separation of proteins, in situ protein hydrolysis, de novo sequencing of peptides by MALDI and ESI MS(2), protein identification, and relative quantitation of protein by denaturing capillary electrophoresis was coupled with the determination of fatty acids and metal ions content by GM-MS and ICPMS in farmed and wild sea bass filet. Our results show that aquaculture could induce significant chemical and biochemical differences in fish muscle that may have an impact on food quality.

Functional genomics and proteomics of the cellular osmotic stress response in `non-model' organisms

“…Even if homologous peptide sequences differ by only a single amino acid, identification of the corresponding protein is prevented because peptide masses will not match. Nevertheless, fish proteins with highly homologous sequence stretches can still be identified using peptide mass fingerprinting Monti, G. et al, 2005;Zupanc et al, 2006;Lee et al, 2006). Success rates of protein identification in non-model species can be increased using an MSBLAST approach that is exclusively based on sequence similarity and does not require matching peptide masses (Lee et al, 2006;Kjaersgard et al, 2006;Russell et al, 2006).…”

Recent advances in the application of capillary electromigration methods for food analysis

“…These applications of microchips-CE include the analysis of DNA [64][65][66], proteins [110], amines [111], seleno-amino acids [112], antioxidants [113,114] and sulfite [115]. Besides, among the current developments in microchip-CE, different detection schemes have been developed to be used together with these microdevices.…”

“…However, the quantitative application of the method remain uncertain since further studies to confirm that plastid copy number is constant across a wider range of varieties, and is not influenced by environmental conditions should be carried out. Lab-on-a-Chip CE technology has been also applied to study the differences between the proteomic profiles obtained from wild and farmed fish [110].…”

Proteomics analysis for the identification of three species of Thunnus

“…Proteomics analysis has been applied to fish products to examine water-soluble muscle proteins from farm and wild fish to show aquaculture effects on seafood quality (Monti et al 2005). Only recently, proteomics was considered for species identification in seafood products (Carrera et al 2007).…”