NFOK19003U Foodomics and Plant Foods

Today, vegetarian lifestyle and plant food based diet is a mega trend in the western world and it is expected to increase in coming years. Furthermore, limited natural resources and the continuously increasing world population demand increase in production of plant based foods in a sustainable way with a minimum environmental footprint. This requires optimization of plant food production in a new circular economy setup, “farm-to-shelf”, where evaluation of food composition, often referred as foodome, is an indivisible part of the process.

• Foodome is defined as an entire collection of molecules in foods including small molecular components like vitamins, polyphenols, amino acids, fatty acids, and macromolecules such as proteins, carbohydrates and lipids as well as minerals
• Foodomics is a newly emerged multidisciplinary field, screening the foodome and studying food and nutrition domains through the application of advanced omics-technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics)
• Foodomics research plays a key role in optimization of food quality, sustainable plant food production, implementation of circular economy approaches (re-use of water and improved utilization of waste streams) in food production, personalised nutrition, and consumer’s wellbeing

Foodomics and Plant Foods is a multidisciplinary course covering a broad domain of scientific methods applied to the analysis of small molecules in plant foods and other biological samples. The course introduces the basics of the multidisciplinary foodomics approaches applied in studies focused on solving global challenges such as sustainable food production, improvement of food quality and nutritional value as well as to prevent food fraud and adulteration. The key component of the course is the advanced omics analytical platforms, including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy, and hyphenated chromatography-mass spectrometry, e.g. GC-MS, for chemical fingerprinting of plant foods and other biological samples including human blood, urine, muscle and faecal. The course provides in-depth knowledge and hands-on training on foodomics study design, acquisition and processing of high-throughput foodomics and metabolomics datasets, including identification of small molecules using spectral information. The course aims to close the current gap in applying foodomics methods to address real life problems related to sustainable food production, improvement of plant food products and human wellbeing.  

The course includes lectures, theoretical and practical exercises through which the students will be familiarised with the state-of-the-art hyphenated analytical platforms (e.g., GC-MS, NMR, NIR, and Raman) applied for small molecular screening, and to learn the principles behind these methods. In addition, method optimization and establishment of standard operating procedures (SOPs) will be taught using advanced Design of experiments (DoE) approaches. Moreover, the students will learn about different approaches used in small molecular screening including targeted metabolite analysis, profiling of one or few plant food metabolite classes as well as untargeted way of screening small molecules in foods, plants, and bio-fluid samples. The course will also provide comprehensive teaching and practical exercises on data handling prior to convert raw instrumental data into an informative metabolite table. This will include hands-on trainings in processing and analysis of large foodomics datasets using advanced multivariate data analysis algorithms.