Mass Spectrometry in Food Proteomics

The introduction of “soft” desorption/ionization methods such as ESI and MALDI has determined a breakthrough in the application of mass spectrometry to the structural analysis of proteins. The contemporary advancement of bioinformatics, together with the possibility to combine these mass spectrometric methods with electrophoretic or chromatographic separation techniques has opened the new field of proteome analysis and, more generally, has established these approaches as indispensable tools in several areas, including food proteomics. In this tutorial, the so-called bottom-up and top-down proteomic approaches will be described together with a necessarily not exhaustive series of their current applications for the characterization of food proteins.