Food Fraud: A Simple and Efficient LC-MS/MS Approach for Peptide-Based Food Authentication

Food fraud includes the addition of inferior components or the substitution of substances. Besides being of economic concern, this might furthermore pose a health risk for consumers. Therefore, the detection of replacements is of high importance. For the identification of species, in recent years proteomic methods gained more and more importance. In this work, an easy and efficient approach of targeted peptide analytics for revealing food fraud is presented. One of the most common workflows for protein analytics was improved by the application of urease to hydrolyze the urea in the extraction buffer; therefore, no further cleanup is required. By considering only selected compounds and the use of open-source databases for the selection of the target peptides for the adoption of the analytical methods, no time-consuming basic research is required. For the detection of the substitutes, it is not necessary to know the absolute concentration of the component. In these cases, the calculation of the proportion of a species in relation to the total content of all analyzed compounds is sufficient.