Foodomic profiling approaches for the characterisation of bioactive molecules in existing raw plant and animals materials or reformulated/implemented foods by sustainable analytical methodologies

Plant raw materials, especially wild-type phenotypes such as ancient grains, native legumes, wild leafy vegetables, and their by-products, together with non-plant products included in vegetarian lifestyles, such as milk-derived products and honeybees, can be considered functional foods. An essential aspect of food production is improving the nutritional value of food products while reducing anti-nutritional factors and allergenic proteins by exploiting mild technologies and/or fermentation processes. Reformulated products are designed to be novel functional food mixtures containing both nutrients and main secondary metabolites with human health benefits. This research project is focused on the foodomic profiling of raw and reformulated food matrices by novel analytical methods that combine new extraction methodologies based on chemical safety green approaches with conventional chromatographic and highly selective MS/NMR techniques. A nutrigenomics approach will also be considered.
 

Raw food materials, reformulated and implemented products obtained from plant and animal raw materials, including legumes, milk and derived products, and honeybees, will be extracted by both conventional and sustainable green extraction methods, e.g. microwave hydro-diffusion and gravity, solid/liquid extraction using solvents/mixtures including natural deep eutectic solvents, amphiphilic molecules aggregates and/or microwave/ultrasound-assisted techniques. An untargeted and comprehensive multi-technique characterisation approach will obtain parallel quantitative profiling of the main proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, amino acids, and secondary metabolites. Fourier transform infrared, HPLC-DAD/fluorimetric detection and chemical and enzymatic assays on bioactive molecules will also be used for qualitative evaluation and screening of metabolic profiles. Metabolic and proteomic profiles will be evaluated by HPLC-HRMS, GC-MS and NMR analysis, bioinformatic procedures, and computational biology approach.
 

Development of novel analytical methods in which sustainable extraction methods and highly selective and sensitive instrumental investigative MS- and NMR-based techniques are combined, enable the deep characterization of bioactive compounds with potential nutraceutical properties, including proteins, essential amino acids, vitamins, fatty acids, polysaccharides and others (D4.2.2.1.).
The optimised NMR and HPLC-HRMS methods will be applied for quali/quantitative chemical analysis of at least two existing, reformulated, and implemented products. These methods will also be applied to control chemical contaminants generated during food processing to preserve functional molecules. In addition, biological and microbiological knowledge will enable the pursuit of verification of the biological activity/nutritional quality of formulation of novel foods by in vitro/in vivo models and comparative study of results of foods/food prototypes (D 4.2.2.2.).