Chemometrics, Mass Spectrometry, and Foodomics

Foodomics has been proposed as a new research area that uses the powerful “omics” technologies to explore food and nutrition systems (Capozzi and Placucci, 2009; Cifuentes, 2009). In Foodomics studies mass spectrometry (MS) techniques are considered most important due to their extremely high sensitivity and selectivity. Very oftenMS is used after a separation technique such as liquid chromatography (LC), gas chromatography (GC), and capillary electrophoresis (CE) to ensure that highly complex food samples are separated into less complex parts before reaching theMS detector. Seen from a physical, chemical, and biological perspective, food systems (and biofluids) are complex multifactorial systems containing mixtures of heterogeneous chemical mixtures of heterogeneous classes of molecules as well as complex physical structures such as amorphous solids, aqueous solutions, gels, macromolecules, macro-organelles, cells, crystals, pores, and cavities. The nature of food samples thus makes extraction and separation on a specific column (GC or LC) combined with a mass separator the logical choice of analytical method. Other techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and vibrational spectroscopy (nearinfrared, infrared, and Raman) can also be applied, but do not match the sensitivity of hyphenated separation and mass spectrometry systems. Applications of foodomics include the genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and/or metabolomic studies of foods for compound profiling, authenticity, and/or biomarker detection related to food