Diet gut interactions: effect of food formats (DGFF)

In order to analyse a wide range of phenolic acids present in human plasma samples, an Unilever GCMS based protocol (Grun, 2008) has been adapted for the GCTOFMS system present at PRI. However, the reproducibility and sensitivity of this GCTOFMS system appeared insufficient to reliably detect compounds of interest in human plasma. As alternative, a more sensitive, reproducible and quantitative targeted method based on UPLC-MRM MS has been developed and validated at PRI which is able to quantify numerous (poly)phenolic metabolites.
An untargeted exogenous metabolic profiling platform, consisting of the LC-PDA-LTQ-Orbitrap FTMS system present at PRI and the PRI-workflow for untargeted metabolomics has been set up successfully and tested for the analyses of plant samples, in vitro gut model samples and human plasma.
A hyphenated SPE-LC-SPE-MS-NMR platform has been implemented and successfully applied for identification of low-abundance (M) phenolic metabolites in gut model samples and urine (Klinkenberg, 2010)
Advanced data-analysis methods have been developed and implemented for detecting subtle changes in exo-metabolome upon dietary interventions (van Velzen, 2008), recognition of nutrikinetic phenotypes (van Velzen, 2009) and correlating these with the gut microbiome (van Velzen, in preparation).