Foodomics and infrared spectroscopy: from compounds to functionality

• Foodomics has been defined by as a new discipline that studies both the food and nutritional interactions.
• The combination of multivariate data analysis and infrared (IR) spectroscopy can be considered as one of the main tools in foodomics.
• Different to most of the current foodomic methods IR requires minimal or no sample pre-processing during the analysis.

Foodomics has been defined by as a new discipline that studies both the food and nutritional domain by applying and combining cutting-edge analytical technologies and multivariate data analysis. Pioneered by physicists and chemists, methods based in infrared spectroscopy have traditionally been used for the identification of molecular entities in several food matrices. Infrared spectroscopy embraces a number of techniques allowing the analysis of different type of samples (e.g. liquid, solids, pastes), determining specific applications such as attenuated total reflection (ATR, ATR-MIR), Fourier transform (FT-MIR, FT-NIR), transmitance (T), transflectance or reflectance (R), diffuse reflectance (DF).