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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unitn.it/oai:iris.unitn.it:11572/355331 |
| Date | 24 October 2022 |
| Creators | Ceci, Adriana Teresa |
| Contributors | Dr. Peter Robatscher, Ceci, Adriana Teresa, Mattivi, Fulvio |
| Publisher | Università degli studi di Trento, place:TRENTO |
| Source Sets | Università di Trento |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess |
| Relation | firstpage:1, lastpage:156, numberofpages:156, alleditors:Dr. Peter Robatscher |
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