Foodomics & Plant Foods is a multidisciplinary course covering a broad domain of scientific methods applied to the analysis of small molecules in plant foods and other biological samples. The course introduces the basics of the foodomics, which is the research field investigating molecular composition of foods and their impact on human health and wellbeing. Students will also learn how molecular fingerprints of foods can be related to food production and detection of food fraud and adulteration. The course will cover advanced hyphenated analytical platforms, Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy that are most often used in chemical fingerprinting of plant foods and other biological samples including human blood, urine, muscle and faecal. The course also provides in-depth knowledge on large-scale foodomics/metabolomics study design, data acquisition, data pre-processing and data analysis, as well as identification of molecules using spectral information.

The course includes lectures, theoretical and practical exercises through which the students will be familiarised with analytical platforms, method optimization and establishment of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for targeted and untargeted analysis of metabolites in food and other biological samples. The course will also provide comprehensive teaching and practical exercises on data handling prior to convert raw instrumental data into an informative metabolite table. This will include hands-on trainings in processing and analysis of large foodomics datasets using advanced multivariate data analysis methods. Thus, if possible, students can bring their own foodomics/metabolomics datasets to train on them during the course.