Food Metabolomics Service

Overview

As the food safety situation continues to change and develop, people's requirements for food quality continue to increase. In the case of limitations in conventional compliance testing, metabolomics technology has shown great potential for application. According to different research objects of metabolomics, it can be divided into untargeted metabolomics analysis and targeted metabolomics analysis. Untargeted metabolomics scans metabolites in an unbiased manner, and analyzes to find as many metabolic components as possible. Then use statistical methods to find compounds that can reflect the differences between groups, so as to distinguish differences between different individuals. Targeted metabolomics is to pre-set certain known markers and conduct targeted extraction studies on them to verify hypothetical markers.

Food metabolomics mainly from farm to table food ingredients, food quality, food processing, and to evaluate food pathogens, has been applied in food safety (assessment of microbial toxins and allergens, nutrition agent, foodborne pathogens, insecticide resistance), food quality, nutritional value, food authenticity (adulteration and geographical sources) and food traceability, etc.

Creative Proteomics has established a food metabolomics analysis platform. We are equipped with mass spectrometry systems, nuclear magnetic resonance systems and data analysis software to help researchers more quickly, efficiently and accurately conduct food characterization, food composition identification, and nutrient composition research.

The workflow of food metabolomics (Kim et al., 2016)

What Can You Achieve with Mass Spectrometry?

• Food metabolic diversity analysis: Analysis of food metabolites in different time, environmental conditions under the content changes.
• Food flavor analysis: Analysis of metabolites and metabolic pathways that affect food flavor.
• Food-borne pathogen detection: Food-borne pathogenic bacteria will synthesize and release some organic small molecules during the growth process. Metabolomics is used to study the content of all metabolites in the growth process of food-borne pathogenic bacteria. After statistical multi-dimensional data analysis, certain accurate biomarkers can be obtained, which can turn to the detection of targeted marker metabolites for the detection of food-borne pathogens.
• Food adulteration and quality identification: Untargeted metabolomic analysis is used to identify key differential compounds between the real and adulterated samples. Then tracking and analyzing the differential metabolites through targeted metabolomics can effectively deal with the adulteration of any raw material and any link.
• Food origin traceability: The application of omics technology combined with stoichiometry method can accurately identify the differences of food in different producing areas and effectively distinguish the authenticity of geographical indication products.

Reference

1. Kim S, Kim J, Yun E J, et al. Food metabolomics: from farm to human. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 2016, 37: 16-23.