Mass Spectrometry for Food Quality and Safety

In the last decades, the consumers' demand for safe and high quality food has highly increased in developed countries. A strong confidence in food and food industries contributes to the demand and the whole market, assuring food safety, quality and health benefits for everyone. At the same time, the food industry needs to guarantee adequate, efficient and robust technologies in the entire production chain to fulfill these requests. Many studies and approaches have been proposed, along with innovative methods, including different processes such as packaging, application of antimicrobials, high pressure processing, and many others, in order to reduce contamination levels and ensure safe products. In addition, the number of health conscious consumers has significantly increased, thus promoting new discoveries in food manufacture. Indeed, several innovations in food production concerning the development of products enriched with functional ingredients, the removal of specific components (e.g. lactose-free or gluten-free), with an overall improve in food quality. In this framework, enormous technological improvements have been made to ensure food quality and safety. In addition to classical approaches, "omics" technologies for the quality and safety control of food have been successfully exploited, originating a new field named "foodomics". In particular, the use of "omics" strategies implies the development of powerful and reliable analytical instruments. Mass spectrometry (MS) with high reproducibility, specificity, sensitivity and high-throughput features, represents the ideal methodological choice to analyze food quality and safety. Moreover, MS can be easily coupled to robust separation tools. With all these features, the use of MS in food science is gaining an always increasing interest. In this book, MS-based approaches for the study of food quality and safety are described and discussed, in order to illustrate recent innovative approaches and present the huge potential of MS. The book is structured in three sections.The Section 1 is a brief presentation of the state-of-the-art about food safety as a global challenge, highlighting the continuous need of attention to ensure food safety in all the food supply chain. In addition, the role of consumers in seafood quality and safety is reported as an example. The Section 2 is a methodological part, presenting some basic principles of classical MS-based approaches, such as tandem MS/MS, used to study peptides and glycoproteins, but also metabolomics. Recent MS-based approaches and platform are also reported, including high resolution MS (HR-MS) using Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR) and Orbitrap instruments. Besides MS/MS methods, gas chromatography MS (GC-MS) is another commonly used approach to evaluate food composition and traceability. Finally, some recent advances in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) MS, such as MALDI imaging MS, and ion mobility MS are also reported. The Section 3 analyzes recent MS-based applications for food quality and safety. Among others, food quality can be ensured by monitoring the geographic origin, as reported for the Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese with a non-targeted MS-based approach. Moreover, the virgin olive oil quality can be evaluated by analyzing the volatile compound profiling by a combined MS platform, and also the antioxidant quality of bread can be improved and monitored by MS. The quality of other commonly used food products as vinegar, milk and cheese can be checked by using MS-based methods. Finally, few examples of MS-based approach to ensure food safety are reported, including the determination of pesticides in cucumber by GC-MS, and the search of contaminants as mycotoxins and aflatoxins in food, including bread and grains.Overall, this book is a tool to demonstrate the huge usefulness of MS-based approaches to study and improve food quality, safety and traceability.