PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Julia M. Gauglitz AU - Christine M. Aceves AU - Alexander A. Aksenov AU - Gajender Aleti AU - Jehad Almaliti AU - Amina Bouslimani AU - Elizabeth A. Brown AU - Anaamika Campeau AU - Andrés Mauricio Caraballo-Rodríguez AU - Rama Chaar AU - Ricardo R. da Silva AU - Alyssa M. Demko AU - Francesca Di Ottavio AU - Emmanuel Elijah AU - Madeleine Ernst AU - L. Paige Ferguson AU - Xavier Holmes AU - Justin J.J. van der Hooft AU - Alan K. Jarmusch AU - Lingjing Jiang AU - Kyo Bin Kang AU - Irina Koester AU - Brian Kwan AU - Bohan Ni AU - Jie Li AU - Yueying Li AU - Alexey V. Melnik AU - Carlos Molina-Santiago AU - Aaron L. Oom AU - Morgan W. Panitchpakdi AU - Daniel Petras AU - Robert Quinn AU - Nicole Sikora AU - Katharina Spengler AU - Bahar Teke AU - Anupriya Tripathi AU - Sabah Ul-Hasan AU - Fernando Vargas AU - Alison Vrbanac AU - Anthony Q. Vu AU - Steven C Wang AU - Kelly Weldon AU - Kayla Wilson AU - Jacob M. Wozniak AU - Michael Yoon AU - Nuno Bandeira AU - Pieter C. Dorrestein TI - Untargeted Mass Spectrometry-Based Metabolomics Tracks Molecular Changes in Raw and Processed Foods and Beverages AID - 10.1101/347716 DP - 2018 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 347716 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/15/347716.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/15/347716.full AB - A major aspect of our daily lives is the need to acquire, store and prepare our food. Storage and preparation can have drastic effects on the compositional chemistry of our foods, but we have a limited understanding of the temporal nature of processes such as storage, spoilage, fermentation and brewing on the chemistry of the foods we eat. Here, we performed a temporal analysis of the chemical changes in foods during common household preparations using untargeted mass spectrometry and novel data analysis approaches. Common treatments of foods such as home fermentation of yogurt, brewing of tea, spoilage of meats and ripening of tomatoes altered the chemical makeup through time, through both chemical and biological processes. For example, brewing tea altered its composition by increasing the diversity of molecules, but this change was halted after 4 min of brewing. The results indicate that this is largely due to differential extraction of the material from the tea and not modification of the molecules during the brewing process. This is in contrast to the preparation of yogurt from milk, spoilage of meat and the ripening of tomatoes where biological transformations directly altered the foods molecular composition. Comprehensive assessment of chemical changes using multivariate statistics showed the varied impacts of the different food treatments, while analysis of individual chemical changes show specific alterations of chemical families in the different food types. The methods developed here represent novel approaches to studying the changes in food chemistry that can reveal global alterations in chemical profiles and specific transformations at the chemical level.HighlightsWe created a reference data set for tomato, milk to yogurt, tea, coffee, turkey and beef.We show that normal preparation and handling affects the molecular make-up.Tea preparation is largely driven by differential extraction.Formation of yogurt involves chemical transformations.The majority of meat molecules are not altered in 5 days at room temperature.