Functional Foods
The world population continues to grow. To meet food demands, alternative foods are being created. In addition, there are movements to provide natural food extracts from fruits, berries, fungi and plants with established clinical data to show value as anti-oxidants, anti-aging, cholesterol lowering and more medical claims. To understand the active ingredients in these complex mixtures, HMT employs 3 different platforms to measure a wide range of ingredients. Then using our function food library, we categorize the functionality of those most abundant and bioavailable ingredients to match functional composition to support health claims.
Food Metabolomics
Functional foods and cultivated meat cells are a growing and expanding business. HMT is participating in this growth by providing compositional analysis of plant, fungi, berry extracts, analyzing and comparing fresh meat with meat cells and media and lastly by providing analysis for food intake biomarkers.
Compositional Analysis: Using two different lipid LCMS platforms (LC-OMEGA and MSCAN) with a CEMS polar platform (OMEGA Scan) we can typically discover over 1000 metabolites in extracts. Using advanced mode, we add more metabolites that are not in our library using mass matching. These metabolites are listed by abundance, class and functionality.
Cultivated cells and media: Using LCMS and CEMS platforms we monitor cell metabolism in meat cells and media to learn how to expand biomass production and/or modify nutrient or taste profile. Pathway maps and metabolomic analysis can provide a deep understanding of co-cultured cells that can help drive culture growth and product profiles.
Food Intake Biomarkers reveal nutritional status by measuring specific metabolites and groups of metabolites that are associated with citrus fruits, berries, meats, fish and other functional foods.
Application Examples
- Metabolites released from apoptotic cells act as tissue messengers
- Hypoxia tolerance in the Norrin-deficient retina and the chronically hypoxic brain studied at single-cell resolution
- AMPK, a Regulator of Metabolism and Autophagy, Is Activated by Lysosomal Damage via a Novel Galectin-Directed Ubiquitin Signal Transduction System