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Tools for directly scrutinizing the animal volatolome and tracing food contaminants

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Tools for directly scrutinizing the animal volatolome and tracing food contaminants

Tools for directly scrutinizing the animal volatolome and tracing food contaminants

The methods currently used to guarantee the chemical safety of animal origin foods specifically target either the chemical contaminants or their residues. These methods may be powerful, but they are also terribly expensive and cannot viably serve for large-scale standard procedure system-wide food safety tests. Volatolomics, a branch of chemistry that studies the volatile organic compounds emitted by a biological system, raises promising prospects for a much cheaper, high-throughput screening solution to detect food-chain exposures to chemical contaminants.

RESULTS
In an effort to better exploit information captured in the volatolome, we pursued three objectives:

1) Minimize the distortions caused during the process of physically extracting volatiles from biological tissues of fluids by proposing a purpose-dedicated solid-phase micro extraction method.

2) Mobilize a signal processing algorithm purpose-engineered for automatically accurately aligning volatolomics signals to systematically and automatically detect the hundreds of volatile compounds that make up the volatolome. This approach enables the most exhaustive characterization possible, without missing potential marker compounds.

3) Maximize a chemometrics method to extract marker proteins from this in-depth volatolome composition. The multi-matrix method selected for use minimizes the loss of information induced by more classical methods in which the 3D analytical signals have to be matricized in order to ‘average’ or flatten the volatolomics data.

FUTURE OUTLOOK
These advances in methodology have confirmed the value of the volatolome as a tool for diagnosing livestock exposure to various chemical contaminants (environmental pollutants, pesticides, veterinary drugs). Work is underway to understand the biochemical mechanisms that generate the markers emerged and to test their robustness.

See also

Abouelkaram, S., Ratel, J., Truan, C., Engel, E. (2017). Marker discovery in volatolomics based on systematic alignment of GC-MS signals: Application to food authentication. Analytica Chimica Acta, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aca.2017.08.019.

Berge, P., Ratel, J., Fournier, A.,… & Engel, E. (2011). Use of volatile compound metabolic signatures in poultry liver to back-trace dietary exposure to rapidly metabolized xenobiotics. Environmental science & technology, 45, 6584-6591. DOI: 10.1021/es200747h

Bouhlel, J., Ratel, J., Abouelkaram, S.,... & Engel, E. (2017a). Solid-phase microextraction set-up for the analysis of liver volatolome to detect livestock exposure to micropollutants. Journal of Chromatography A, 1497, 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chroma.2017.03.008

Bouhlel, J., Ratel, J., Abouelkaram, S.,... & Rutledge, D.N. (2017b).Comparison of Common Components Analysis with Principal Components Analysis and Independent Components Analysis: Application to SPME-GC-MS Volatolomic Signatures. Talanta, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.talanta.2017.10.025.

Kim, S.J., Choi, S.J., Jang, J.S.,… & Kim, I.D. (2017). Innovative Nanosensor for Disease Diagnosis. Accounts of Chemical Research, 50, 1587-1596.

Modification date : 24 May 2023 | Publication date : 10 July 2018 | Redactor : Sylvie Clerjon