Journal of Nutrition & Food Sciences
Open Access
ISSN: 2155-9600
ISSN: 2155-9600
Pei Chen
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Nutr Food Sci
Producing a comprehensive overview of the chemical content of biologically-derived material is a major challenge. Methods used to profiling of such chemical content are usually long and laborious. Apart from ensuring adequate metabolome coverage, there are major technical difficulties associated with data pre-processing and signal identification. To address these factors flow-injection electrospray mass spectrometry (FIMS) has been developed as a high throughput metabolite fingerprinting tool. With little sample preparation, no chromatography, and instrument cycle times of less than 2 min, it saves significant resources (manpower, chemical reagents, column, and time) compared to other methods. Data pre-processing usually include aligning extracted mass spectra; generate mass-intensity matrices, and chemometric analysis. The method has been applied to differentiating between skullcap from Germanders, between cinnamon species, between ginseng species, between of di and tetraploid Gynostemma pentaphyllum (Thunb.) Makino, between organically and conventionally grown grape fruits, peppermints, and sages. In addition to differentiating between the samples, the method can also pin point exactly what components in a sample set are responsible for the chemical difference detected. Combined with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and high-resolution accurate mass (HRAM) mass spectrometry (MS), the components that are responsible for the chemical differences can usually be annotated or identified. Not only can the method be used as a dietary assessment method, it can also be used to help design better, more meaningful and insightful nutritional or clinical studies.