Chapter 8: Omics and Food Authentication

Authentication of food products is a global concern for consumers, producers, distributors and control bodies. The cost of adulteration of food stuffs, either deliberately and economically-motivated, or inadvertently, is estimated in the billion-dollar range per year, in addition to the risks to human health derived from introducing non-declared ingredients into food. Diagnostic methods are therefore required to assure the quality of the different food characteristics. In this sense, ‘omics’ molecular-based tools, mainly proteomics, genomics and metabolomics, are helping to accelerate the development of methods targeting the assessment of food authenticity, performing better than previous methods in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, throughput, multiplexing and quantitative accuracy and precision.