doi: 10.17113/ftb.55.03.17.5044 

Foodomics and Food Safety: Where We Are

Uroš Andjelković^1,3, Martina Šrajer Gajdošik², Dajana Gašo-Sokač⁵, Tamara Martinović¹ and Djuro Josić^1,4*

¹Department of Biotechnology, University of Rijeka, Radmile Matejčićc 2, HR-51 000 Rijeka, Croatia
²Department of Chemistry, J. J. Strossmayer University of Osijek, Cara Hadrijana 8/A, HR-31 000 Osijek, Croatia
³Department of Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Technology and Metallurgy, University of Belgrade, Njegoševa 12,
  RS-11 000 Belgrade, Serbia
⁴Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, 222 Richmond St, Providence, RI 02903, USA
⁵Faculty of Food Technology, J. J. Strossmayer University of Osijek, Franje Kuhača 20, HR-31 000 Osijek, Croatia

Article history:
Received: November 4, 2016
Accepted: May 31, 2017

Key words:
foodomics, food safety, foodborne pathogens, sample preparation, analytical technologies

Summary:
The power of foodomics as a discipline that is now broadly used for quality assurance of food products and adulteration identification, as well as for determining the safety of food, is presented. Concerning sample preparation and application, maintenance of highly sophisticated instruments for both high-performance and high-throughput techniques, and analysis and data interpretation, special attention has to be paid to the development of skilled analysts. The obtained data shall be integrated under a strong bioinformatics environment. Modern mass spectrometry is an extremely powerful analytical tool since it can provide direct qualitative and quantitative information about a molecule of interest from only a minute amount of sample. Quality of this information is influenced by the sample preparation procedure, the type of mass spectrometer used and the analyst’s skills. Technical advances are bringing new instruments of increased sensitivity, resolution and speed to the market. Other methods presented here give additional information and can be used as complementary tools to mass spectrometry or for validation of obtained results. Genomics and transcriptomics, as well as affinity-based methods, still have a broad use in food analysis. Serious drawbacks of some of them, especially the affinity-based methods, are the cross-reactivity between similar molecules and the influence of complex food matrices. However, these techniques can be used for pre-screening in order to reduce the large number of samples. Great progress has been made in the application of bioinformatics in foodomics. These developments enabled processing of large amounts of generated data for both identification and quantification, and for corresponding modeling.

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