Developing metabolomics and proteomics tools to identify the provenance of foods and beverages of economic importance in Scotland
Project Lead
Challenges
The consumer has a right to know what is contained in the food they eat. There is significant risk in the food supply chain of fraud, where food is replaced by a cheaper or inferior alternative. The risks are particularly high for several food and drink products produced within Scotland that attract a premium because of their higher quality and consumer desirability (for example, whisky, beef and honey). It estimated that 4.4% of spirit sales in 2016 were lost to counterfeiting across the European Union. Given the premium nature and high demand for Scotch Whisky, the losses are likely to be larger. At the current rate, of £4.7 billion in exports, this equates to £207 million every year. Following the UK’s exit from the European Union and the need to develop more global food chains, the potential for food fraud has increased. There is a critical need to develop new methods to confirm the provenance of food substances across the food supply chain.
While DNA-based approaches are often used to assess food fraud, they are limited to foods that contain DNA of sufficient quality and quantity to allow polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based methods. Thus, DNA-based approaches are unsuitable for liquids, and there have also been recent concerns in processed foods that DNA may be too degraded to be reliably detected during PCR tests. Mass spectrometry metabolomics and proteomics workflows hold great promise for food authentication and understanding the provenance of a range of foods including meats, fish, honey and alcoholic drinks. Proteomics is the large-scale analysis of the protein complement of a biofluid, tissue, organism or food while metabolomics is the large-scale analysis of the small molecule composition of a biofluid, cell, tissue, organism or food. While most approaches of these two ‘omics’ have been applied to biomedical applications, there is increasing realisation that these approaches could be used in food science.
Questions
- What new methodologies and data can help identify and track the origin of Scottish food products?
Solutions
This project aims to develop mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and proteomics tools to identify the provenance of foods and beverages of economic importance to Scotland
Application of proteomics to determine the provenance of food
The rationale for choosing to apply proteomics to meat authenticity is that although there are techniques already available, they can be limited by food processing or cooking. Furthermore, the proteomics tools produced could be applied to a range of other applications including diagnosing plant and animal diseases (including humans) when antibodies either show cross-reactivity/poor specificity or are still under development.
We have surveyed the literature for applications of proteomics in food authenticity, focussing on meat but also including fish and shellfish given the need and market size to:
- Methods and the most discriminatory proteins used to differentiate meat according to its source in terms of species and breeds
- The impact of food processing and cooking, and storage on the proteome
- Any work discriminating breeds within a species
Simultaneously we have developed an open-profiling, full-proteome analysis of beef, lamb, horse, pork, venison, chicken and turkey.
Application of metabolomics to determine the provenance of foods and beverages
A range of metabolomics approaches have been used to determine the provenance of drinks, particularly alcoholic drinks that may command a higher price because of the region of production. This has included 1H NMR spectroscopy, GC-MS and LC-MS. We are using mass spectrometry as part of a metabolomics workflow to measure the metabolite composition of liquids. We are using whisky as an exemplar of the power of open-profiling metabolomics to generate a unique metabolite fingerprint. We are demonstrating how such approaches could be used to determine the provenance of liquids where methods based on PCR of DNA and antibody detection are precluded. We are generating a series of standard operating procedures that could be applied to similar products in the future.
Project Partners
Progress
This project sets out to develop new methods for determining where food comes from and whether it is safe to eat. We know a number of Scottish foods and beverages are highly valued by the consumer, including whisky, beef and salmon. Because of this, these products are also at risk of food fraud, with recent high-profile cases examining fake Scotch whisky and British beef in the news. The aim of this project is to develop two new methods to identify the provenance and authenticity of foods and beverages based on the analytical chemistry approach of mass spectrometry (MS). MS identifies molecules by very accurately weighing them as charged particles, called ions.
The first part of the project aims to discriminate different types of meat by MS. We started by conducting a review of the scientific literature to determine the best methods as used by the research community. Two strategies were identified: i. targeted analysis used to quantify different meat types and ii. open profiling used to detect a wide range of proteins/peptides which may be useful for discriminating different strains of livestock and possibly their diet.
This work has allowed us to focus our attention in year 2 on developing methods based on these strategies.
Reports
A report was prepared for RESAS describing the current literature in this field and the justification for the methods we will apply to meat authenticity from year 2. Report can be accessed here
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