Elsevier

Food Chemistry

Volume 210, 1 November 2016, Pages 200-211
Food Chemistry

Review
Significant advancement of mass spectrometry imaging for food chemistry

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.04.096Get rights and content

Highlights

  • MALDI-MSI is a two-dimensional MALDI-MS technology.

  • MALDI-MSI can visualize the spatial distribution of biomolecules in foods.

  • We describe the principles and applications of MALDI-MSI in food related fields.

Abstract

Food contains various compounds that have an impact on our daily lives. Many technologies have been established to analyze these molecules of interest in foods. However, the analysis of the spatial distribution of these compounds in foods using conventional technology, such as high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry or gas chromatography-mass spectrometry is difficult. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI-MSI) is considered an ideal complementary approach. MALDI-MSI is a two-dimensional MALDI-MS technology that can detect compounds in a tissue section without extraction, purification, separation, or labeling. MALDI-MSI can be used to visualize the spatial distribution of chemical compounds or biomolecules in foods. Although the methodology of MALDI-MSI in food science is not yet fully established, the versatility of MALDI-MSI is expected to open a new frontier in food science. Herein, we describe the principles and applications of MALDI-MSI in food science and related fields.

Introduction

Food provides essential chemical constituents, such as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and vitamins, to the body. This is the principal function of food, i.e., trophicity. In addition, food serves two more functions: one is taste, and the other is bioregulatory. Elements of foods, such as color, flavor, and texture, bring us pleasure. Health-promotion, disease prevention, and biophylaxis are the representative bioregulatory functions of foods. These bioregulatory functions are attributed to the characteristic chemical compounds in each food. Compounds that possess beneficial bioactivities so called functional food factors. For example, consuming fish once a week is associated with a 16% lower risk of fatal coronary heart disease (Zheng et al., 2012), and a 14% lower risk of stroke (Xun & He, 2012) when compared to a population with a low level of fish consumption. These benefits are attributed to the omega-3 fatty acids, e.g., eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) that are present in fish oil. They have several beneficial functions, which include the inhibition of platelet aggregation (Gao et al., 2013), anti-inflammatory effects (Oh et al., 2010), and the amelioration of hypertriglyceridemia (Davidson et al., 2007). Rice is a source of tocopherol, tocotrienol, and γ-oryzanol, etc. Tocopherol and tocotrienol are members of the vitamin E family, which have antioxidant, anticancer, and serum cholesterol reducing activities (Colombo, 2010). γ-Oryzanol is a mixture of ferulic acid esters of triterpene alcohols and plant sterols. Some representative functions of γ-oryzanol are antioxidant (Goufo & Trindade, 2014) and serum cholesterol reducing activities (Wilson, Nicolosi, Woolfrey, & Kritchevsky, 2007). These are just a sample of the bioactivity of functional food factors. Because of the many useful applications of functional food factors, they are attractive ingredients for improving quality of life.

At the same time, there is considerable interest in securing food safety related to food origin, fungal toxin, allergen, or agrochemical (Agrochemical is useful to supply safe agricultural products, but it is sometimes harmful to the body and environment). To secure food safety, it is important to develop the analytical methods to determine chemical compound in food or to estimate the impact of food components on the human body. Recently, the food-related analytical method has undergone rapid development. The unknown bioactivities or action mechanisms can be comprehensively assessed by proteomic and transcriptomic analyses using microarray technology, and by metabolomic analysis. High-performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (HPLC–MS) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) has enabled the quantification and identification of the chemical components in foods. These techniques provided an immense amount of beneficial information about food function or food safety. However, there is little information regarding the distribution of molecules of interests in agricultural, forestry, and fishery products, processed foods, or our bodies, because of the difficulty of analysis. To accomplish this, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI-MSI) is an ideal complementary technique. MALDI-MSI can visualize the spatial distribution of several molecules in tissue sections. Herein, we briefly describe the principles and applications of MALDI-MSI in food science.

Section snippets

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry imaging

Several methods, which include secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-MS (LA-ICP-MS), desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), and MALDI can be used for MSI. Herein, we focused on MALDI because it is currently widely used for MSI in food science. MALDI is considered a “soft” ionization technique when compared to other methods. The first MALDI-MS experiment was reported by Karas and Hillenkamp (1988). They reported that serum albumin (67,000 Da) was

Application of MALDI-MSI in food science and related fields

After the introduction of MALDI-MSI by Caprioli et al. (1997), it has been applied to various fields including medical, pharmaceutical, and biological research. Numerous successful applications have been developed in these fields, but there are fewer examples of their actual application for food despite the increase in demand for the biochemical imaging of food products. Table 1 shows an overview of research using the application of MALDI-MSI for the analysis related to food science. Here,

Limitation

There is major concern to take into account in MALDI-MSI analysis. The detection of molecules in the tissue section is influenced by the condition of analytical region. Namely, molecules in food samples might not be ionized equally in tissue section. Stoeckli et al. sprayed a compound solution over a rat section with enough amount of solvent to soak the compound into the section. After MALDI-MSI analysis, the compound was detected over 95% of the whole area but not in 5% of the whole area by

Conclusions

There is an increasing number of expectations for disease prevention using food. Several functional food factors that are expected to prevent human disease have been reported. The determination of the localization of functional food factors in agricultural, forest, and fishery products, or processed foods is useful for creating improved varieties or fine foods. However, functional food factors are typically low molecular weight molecules, containing various molecular species, and this diversity

Acknowledgements

This review was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant No. 25713024 and 25660109) for N.Z. and (Grant No. 26850087) for Y.Y. and by a grant of Strategic Research Foundation Grant-aided Project for Private Universities from Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology, Japan (MEXT), 2015-2017 (S1512004).

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