NMR fingerprinting as a tool to evaluate post-harvest time-related changes of peaches, tomatoes and plums

Publication date: September 2015 Source:Food Research International, Volume 75 Author(s): Claudio Santucci , Leonardo Tenori , Claudio Luchinat The time-related changes of three agricultural products, coming from two distribution routes, have been followed using NMR fingerprinting to monitor metabolic variations occurring during several days of cold storage. An NMR profiling approach was employed to evaluate the variations in metabolic profile and metabolite content in three different agricultural products highly consumed in Italy (peaches, tomatoes and plums) coming from Tuscanian farms and how they change with time after collection. For each product, we followed the time-related changes during cold storage along three different collection periods. We monitored the variations in metabolic fingerprint and the trend of a set of metabolites, focusing our attention on nutritive and health-promoting metabolites (mainly, essential amino acids and antioxidants) as well as metabolites that contribute to the taste. Concurrently, for comparison, the time-dependent changes of the same kind of products coming from large-scale distribution have been also analyzed under the same conditions. In this second category, only slight variations in the metabolic fingerprint and metabolite levels were seen during cold storage. Unsupervised and supervised multivariate statistics was also employed to enlighten the differences between the three collections. In particular it seems that the meta...
Source: Food Research International - Category: Food Science Source Type: research