About this Research Topic

Background

The knowledge about food composition, particularly concerning the different bioactive compounds it may contain, is very important at different levels of the food chain. It is necessary to help consumers make wiser and healthier dietary options and it is relevant to the farmers so they can select the most productive plants and manufacturing conditions as well as identify new or unexplored plants and food products. It is also crucial to the different food traders so they can offer the most appropriate solution for the target client and commercial environments, reflecting the costs of production, transformation, transport, storage, and marketing. Such knowledge, however, is not always readily accessible to the referred players. This may be due to several reasons, including the complexity of many food matrices, incomplete knowledge about the bioactivity of different food components or the cost of analysis, amongst others. In this context, the improvement of the analytical layouts necessary to characterize dietary bioactive compounds is very relevant.

This Research Topic aims to contribute to filling the gap in the knowledge about dietary bioactive compounds by presenting current and novel methodologies being used to obtain information about their presence, concentration, availability and activity in different food products.

Authors are welcomed to submit original work or review manuscripts covering both the extraction approaches, as well as the analytical layouts used to characterize dietary bioactive compounds. Contributions showing faster, greener, with higher throughput potential, non-destructive, near real-time and in-field applications are particularly encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- Innovative extraction procedures for food samples, including coffee, tea, wine, and other beverages; microextraction; solid-phase microextraction; electromembrane extraction; liquid-liquid microextraction; QuEChERS;
- Improved experimental layouts using different analytical approaches: liquid and gas chromatography, spectrometry, spectroscopy, NMR, voltammetry, REIMS, among others;
- Real-time measurements using different sensors.

We would also like to acknowledge that Dr. Natalia Casado Navas (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain) acted as a Topic Coordinator and has contributed to the preparation of the proposal of this Research Topic.

Keywords: Food Composition, Dietary Bioactive Compounds, Food Samples Extraction, Microextraction, Food Analysis, Chromatography, Spectromentry, NMR

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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