HIGH RESOLUTION NMR AS A TOOL IN FOODOMICS STUDIES, THE COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO FOOD AND NUTRITION

In the last years, researchers focused their studies in the development of high throughput omics technologies. Along with the main omics, namely genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, a varieties of related subdisciplines (lipidomics, interactomics, epigenomics etc) raised to exploit several topics like food science, health and disease, nutrition etc. These techniques provide a wide vision of the metabolome, the entire biochemical complement present within every organism. The application of these broad vision to food science represents the comprehensive, high-throughput approach for the exploitation of food science in the light of an improvement of human nutrition and it is known under the name of Foodomics. This allowed researchers to approach the study of foods in their entire domain, following the evolution of all the components, as a consequence, for example, of the use of improved packaging materials, of new process to produce foods with added nutritional values, and modification of sensory characteristics upon food modification. In the present work, high resolution NMR is presented as a valid tool in metabolomics studies (1-3) to follow the metabolite profiles during the shelf life of foods.