ABSTRACT
Food authentication is one of the major areas involved in food quality and safety. Several regulations have been implemented to assure correct information and to avoid species substitution. Food-species identification has traditionally relied on morphological or anatomical analysis. However, this is a difficult task in the case of closely-related species, especially for those products that have been subjected to processing. Therefore, there is a strong need for fast, reliable, molecular identification methods that provide authorities and food industries with the tools needed to comply with labeling and traceability requirements, thus ensuring product quality and protection of the consumer. Proteomics methodologies have recently been proposed as promising strategies for food authentication. Proteomics work includes protein extraction followed by purification, which aims at either clarifying or concentrating proteins, or at reducing the complexity of proteins, and enhancing the target components. Mass spectrometric analysis may be performed either on intact proteins through ‘top-down proteomics’ or on the peptides resulting from enzymatic digestion through ‘bottom-up approach’. Proteomics tools take advantage of the high-throughput capacity of mass spectrometry to achieve fast, robust, and sensitive protein and peptide characterization, detection, and quantification. These methodologies can be applied to species that are poorly characterized in genomic databases, avoiding the time-consuming steps of DNA amplification and sequencing. Moreover, proteomics-based methodologies can be automated to produce fast, reproducible results that allow the high-throughput analysis of foodstuffs. In this chapter, the applications of proteomics have been discussed to authenticate various foods, such as milk, meat, fish, wine, and genetically modified crops.
