Characterization of emerging ingredients for functional foods

As food scientists, we are facing one of the greatest challenges: feeding a growing world population while at the same time, reducing our impact on the environment and decreasing the incidence of diet-related chronic diseases. This challenge can only be met by building a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of food through analytics and bringing this knowledge to practice through innovation. Particular attention is focused today on the functional compounds called glycans, able to modulate the composition of the human gut microbiota. By using liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS), glycans and other bioactive compounds can be measured accurately and reproducibly.

The combined use of new "omics" enables researchers to achieve molecular-level understanding of functional compounds in milk and guides the development of engineering methods to capture value from our food side-streams improving the sustainability of the agricultural enterprise.

This presentation will introduce two case studies to demonstrate how various agricultural by-products, namely, dairy streams and winery by-products.