The use of a plant enzyme for rapid and sensitive analysis of naturally-occurring folates in food by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

How food matrices modulate folate bioaccessibility: A comprehensive overview of recent advances and challenges

The incomplete absorption of dietary folate makes it crucial to understand how food matrices affect folate bioaccessibility. Bioavailability encompasses bioaccessibility, which depicts the proportion that is liberated from the food matrix during digestion and becomes available for absorption. Bioavailability studies are expensive and difficult to control, whereas bioaccessibility studies utilize in vitro digestion models to parameterize the complex digestion, allowing the evaluation of the effect of food matrices on bioaccessibility. This review covers the folate contents in various food matrices, the methods used to determine and the factors affecting folate bioaccessibility, and the advances and challenges in understanding how food matrices affect folate bioaccessibility. The methods for determining bioaccessibility have been improved in the last decade. Current research shows that food matrices modulate folate bioaccessibility by affecting the liberation and stability of folate during digestion but do not provide enough information about folate and food component interactions at the molecular level. In addition, information on folate interconversion and degradation during digestion is scant, hindering our understanding of the impact of food matrices on folate stability. Moreover, the role of conjugase inhibitors should not be neglected when evaluating the nutritional value of food folates. Due to the complexity of food digestion, holistic methods should be applied to investigate bioaccessibility. By synthesizing the current state of knowledge on this topic, this review highlights the lack of in-depth understanding of the mechanisms of how food matrices modulate folate bioaccessibility and provides insights into potential strategies for accurate evaluation of the nutritional value of dietary folate.

Wastewater-derived biohydrogen: Critical analysis of related enzymatic processes at the research and large scales

Organic-rich wastewater is a feasible feedstock for biohydrogen production. Numerous review on the performance of microorganisms and the diversity of their communities during a biohydrogen process were published. However, there is still no in-depth overview of enzymes for biohydrogen production from wastewater and their scale-up applications. This review aims at providing an insightful exploration of critical discussion in terms of: (i) the roles and applications of enzymes in wastewater-based biohydrogen fermentation; (ii) systematical introduction to the enzymatic processes of photo fermentation and dark fermentation; (iii) parameters that affect enzymatic performances and measures for enzyme activity/ability enhancement; (iv) biohydrogen production bioreactors; as well as (v) enzymatic biohydrogen production systems and their larger scales application. Furthermore, to assess the best applications of enzymes in biohydrogen production from wastewater, existing problems and feasible future studies on the development of low-cost enzyme production methods and immobilized enzymes, the construction of multiple enzyme cooperation systems, the study of biohydrogen production mechanisms, more effective bioreactor exploration, larger scales enzymatic biohydrogen production, and the enhancement of enzyme activity or ability are also addressed.

Profiling of naturally occurring folates in a diverse soybean germplasm by HPLC-MS/MS

Soybean is a rich source of folates. We optimised the extraction and detection of folates from soybean seeds by HPLC-MS/MS and analysed the folate content and composition of 1074 accessions. Total folate content ranged from 64.51 to 691.24 μg/100 g fresh weight, with 10-fold variation, and 60 elite accessions with over 400 μg/100 g of total folate were identified. The most abundant component was 5-CHO-H4folate, which accounted for an average of 60% of total folate content. Seed-coat colour, seed weight, ecoregion, and accession type significantly affected soybean folate content. Furthermore, 5-CH3-H4folate correlated positively with seed protein (r = 0.24***) and negatively with oil (r = -0.26***). The geographical distribution of folate according to accession origin revealed that accessions from Northeast China contain higher amounts of total folate and 5-CHO-H4folate. This study provides comprehensive and novel insights into the folate profile of soybean, which will benefit soybean breeding for folate enhancement.

Collaborative study: Quantification of total folate in food using an efficient single-enzyme extraction combined with LC-MS/MS

Quantification of the specific folate vitamers to estimate total folate in foods is not standardized. A collaborative study, including eight European laboratories, was conducted in order to determine the repeatability and reproducibility of the method for folate quantification in foods using the plant-origin γ-glutamyl hydrolase as part of the extraction procedure. The seven food samples analyzed represent the food groups; fruits, vegetables, dairy products, legumes, offal, fish, and fortified infant formula. The homogenization step was included, and six folate vitamers were analyzed using LC-MS/MS. Total folate content, expressed as folic acid equivalent, was 17-490 μg/100 g in all samples. Horwitz ratio values were within the acceptable range (0.60-1.94), except for fish. The results for fortified infant formula, a certified reference material (NIST 1869), confirmed the trueness of the method. The collaborative study is part of a standardization project within the Nordic Committee on Food Analysis (NMKL).

Recent Techniques in Nutrient Analysis for Food Composition Database

Food composition database (FCD) provides the nutritional composition of foods. Reliable and up-to date FCD is important in many aspects of nutrition, dietetics, health, food science, biodiversity, plant breeding, food industry, trade and food regulation. FCD has been used extensively in nutrition labelling, nutritional analysis, research, regulation, national food and nutrition policy. The choice of method for the analysis of samples for FCD often depends on detection capability, along with ease of use, speed of analysis and low cost. Sample preparation is the most critical stage in analytical method development. Samples can be prepared using numerous techniques; however it should be applicable for a wide range of analytes and sample matrices. There are quite a number of significant improvements on sample preparation techniques in various food matrices for specific analytes highlighted in the literatures. Improvements on the technology used for the analysis of samples by specific instrumentation could provide an alternative to the analyst to choose for their laboratory requirement. This review provides the reader with an overview of recent techniques that can be used for sample preparation and instrumentation for food analysis which can provide wide options to the analysts in providing data to their FCD.

Challenges to Quantify Total Vitamin Activity: How to Combine the Contribution of Diverse Vitamers?

This state-of-the-art review aims to highlight the challenges in quantifying vitamin activity in foods that contain several vitamers of a group, using as examples the fat-soluble vitamins A and D as well as the water-soluble folate. The absorption, metabolism, and physiology of these examples are described along with the current analytical methodology, with an emphasis on approaches to standardization. Moreover, the major food sources for the vitamins are numerated. The article focuses particularly on outlining the so-called SLAMENGHI factors influencing a vitamer's' ability to act as a vitamin, that is, molecular species, linkage, amount, matrix, effectors of absorption, nutrition status, genetics, host-related factors, and the interaction of these. After summarizing the current approaches to estimating the total content of each vitamin group, the review concludes by outlining the research gaps and future perspectives in vitamin analysis. There are no standardized methods for the quantification of the vitamers of vitamin A, vitamin D, and folate in foods. For folate and β-carotene, a difference in vitamer activity between foods and supplements has been confirmed, whereas no difference has been observed for vitamin D. For differences in vitamer activity between provitamin A carotenoids and retinol, and between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and vitamin D, international consensus is lacking. The challenges facing each of the specific vitamin communities are the gaps in knowledge about bioaccessibility and bioavailability for each of the various vitamers. The differences between the vitamins make it difficult to formulate a common strategy for assessing the quantitative differences between the vitamers. In the future, optimized stationary digestive models and the more advanced dynamic digestive models combined with in vitro models for bioavailability could more closely resemble in vivo results. New knowledge will enable us to transfer nutrient recommendations into improved dietary advice to increase public health throughout the human life cycle.