MALDI Mass Spectrometry: A Promising Non-Chromatographic Technique

In recent years, food safety and quality have become of great importance and have involved more public concern. Food quality is associated to food authentication and adulteration, or food features that include ingredients and/or additives as antioxidants and chemicals used to improve food taste, aroma and colour. Food safety is concerned with food contaminants and residues as pesticides, veterinary drugs, environmental contaminants, food processing and food packaging contaminants. As a result, demand for the development and the applications of more efficient methodologies to analyze food is significantly growing. In this perspective, a new discipline named foodomics has been recently introduced which applies advanced ‐omic sciences (genomics, proteomics, lipidomics, etc.) in food and nutrition fields for compound profiling, authenticity, food quality or safety, food bioactivity, toxicity issue and so on. Of course, for foodomics studies, mass spectrometry (MS) is considered an indispensable technique due to its intrinsic features, i.e. high sensitivity, selectivity and throughput. Among MS techniques, Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization (MALDI) has demonstrated a great potential in fast screening analyses for food quality and safety, since no chromatographic separation is usually needed. In this chapter, some MALDI MS quality control applications will be presented, based on proteomic and lipidomic approaches or devoted to the individuation of food contaminants.