Measuring the nutritional quality of local plant-based EUREGIO foods

In the recent years, the consumer choices have been focused on health-promoting plant-based food and their preferences are oriented towards regional foodstuff from local productions. Therefore, an important factor for vegetables grown Trentino-Alto Adige (Italy) is to point out the added value of alpine farming to evaluate the nutritional values of farming products. Omics technologies (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics) are aimed at investigating the assessment of different pools of molecules and how they are translated into the structure, function, and dynamics of a biological system or systems in order to provide a comprehensive characterization of a specific organism. Research use the omics techniques to exhaustively understand the functionality of food components. Several sophisticated chromatographic methods, spectroscopic techniques and chemometric tools are applied to give an insight into a comprehensive overview of the intrinsic quality, typicality and regionality of specific plant-based foods in the present PhD thesis: apples and potatoes. The quality of these foods is evaluated by quantifying the secondary metabolites to investigate their nutraceutical values. The aim of this PhD project is to use several analytical techniques (LC-MS, UV-VIS) that are capable of comprehensively characterizing the food metabolome with particular emphasis on those components with high nutritional values. The data analysis and data handling of omics data requires advanced bioinformatic, statistical, and chemometric tools. Potatoes and apples are chosen as target matrices for these studies for their relevance in the local economy and for the peculiar chemical composition of particular interest for their health-promoting proprieties. The information is acquired using several sophisticated chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques, such as ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UHPLC– MS/MS) and UV/VIS. It is integrated to chemometric approaches (principal component analysis (PCA), partial least square regression (PLS), and data fusion) to achieve a comprehensive targeted chemical characterization. The sampling procedures gathers, in the case of the potatoes study, reference cultivars that may be found in the common retailers of Trentino/Alto-Adige and different production areas, the apples of 22 cultivars were harvest from the fields of the Laimburg Research Centre (Vadena, Italy) to guaranty comparability of the obtained data. Our results may be used as solid foundation for a reliable evaluation of apples and potatoes healthy "potential" value based on cutting-edge techniques, which are capable of providing comprehensive data regarding the alpine food quality parameters with high efficiency and reliability