Holistic Analysis Enhances the Description of Metabolic Complexity in Dietary Natural Products

Abstract

In the field of food and nutrition, complex natural products (NPs) are typically obtained from cells/tissues of diverse organisms such as plants, mushrooms, and animals. Among them, edible fruits, grains, and vegetables represent most of the human diet. Because of an important dietary dependence, the comprehensive metabolomic analysis of dietary NPs, performed holistically via the assessment of as many metabolites as possible, constitutes a fundamental building block for understanding the human diet. Both mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are important complementary analytic techniques, covering a wide range of metabolites at different concentrations. Particularly, 1-dimensional 1H-NMR offers an unbiased overview of all metabolites present in a sample without prior knowledge of its composition, thereby leading to an untargeted analysis. In the past decade, NMR-based metabolomics in plant and food analyses has evolved considerably. The scope of the present review, covering literature of the past 5 y, is to address the relevance of 1H-NMR–based metabolomics in food plant studies, including a comparison with MS-based techniques. Major applications of NMR-based metabolomics for the quality control of dietary NPs and assessment of their nutritional values are presented.

Evolution of Quantitative Measures in NMR: Quantum Mechanical qHNMR Advances Chemical Standardization of a Red Clover (Trifolium pratense) Extract

“…Despite its advantage over classical integration, SD is flawed systematically and, thus, less rigorous for building comprehensive analyses of multiple components in complex mixtures. 38 Analogous to chromophores in UV- and molecular/fragment masses in MS-detected quantitation, QM is key to the definition of the spin parameters of the target compounds and ultimately guides the prerequisites of QM-qHNMR analyses. Additionally, non-QM, peak-fitted lines of unknown components can be added to improve the overall fit, their quantitation requires the assignment of partial structures and amu values.…”

Selection and characterization of botanical natural products for research studies: a NaPDI center recommended approach

“…The challenge is that identities of bioactive constituents relevant to the activity being studied are oen not known and are likely to differ depending on the biological activity evaluated. 62,128,129 Assigning bioactive constituents is not trivial, as a given botanical extract may contain hundreds or thousands of constituents. 130 The collective activity of the extract may be due to the combined action of these constituents acting in an additive, synergistic, or antagonistic manner.…”

Comparison of Metabolomics Approaches for Evaluating the Variability of Complex Botanical Preparations: Green Tea (Camellia sinensis) as a Case Study

“…23,24 The primary goal of metabolomics is to correlate changes in the chemical profile of a sample with a corresponding shift in macroscopic phenotype due to a perturbation. 25 Metabolomic studies coupled with statistical analysis (chemometric studies) have been employed to characterize the relationships between the metabolome of green teas and corresponding genotype, origin, quality, or other biotic or abiotic attributes.…”