Capillary electrophoresis for foodomics

Abstract

Assessment of food quality is fundamental to guarantee the authenticity and safety of foods required by consumers and legislation. This includes the control of technological processes and their effects on food constituents, determination of food nutritional value, characterization of food components, or the more recent studies on detection and characterization of new food ingredients with demonstrated beneficial effects on human health. These issues are of key importance for industries, research institutions and regulatory laboratories working in Food Science and Technology. Nowadays, new analytical approaches are emerging to face the everyday more complex problems and exigent demands in Food Science and Technology. In this regard, we have recently defined for the first time in a SCI journal the new field of Foodomics (A. Cifuentes, J. Chromatogr. A, 1216 (2009) 7109; M. Herrero et al., Electrophoresis 2010, 31, 205–228) as a discipline that studies the Food and Nutrition domains through the application of omics technologies. Consequently, Nutrigenomics and Nutrigenetics can be considered as subdisciplines of the more general Foodomics field. Thus, Foodomics would cover e.g., the development of new transgenic foods using molecular tools, the genomic/transcriptomic/proteomic and/or metabolomic study of foods for compounds profiling/authenticity and/or biomarkers detection, new investigations on food functions via nutrigenomics or nutrigenetics approaches, etc. In this context, the use of capillary electromigration methods can show interesting possibilities. In this work, the potential of CE in Foodomics will be demonstrated through different applications carried out by our group.