Carbohydrates make up the largest non-water component of plant-based foods, and are increasingly recognized for their immune-modulating activity and interaction with the gut microbiome. Despite the increased interest in food carbohydrates, we still have limited understanding of their detailed polysaccharide structures due to a lack of advanced analytical platforms. Current methods for carbohydrate characterization suffer from tedious derivatizations, long instrumental run times, while lacking the ability to analyze many monosaccharides simultaneously. Our group has recently developed several methods that can rapidly and precisely characterize the composition, sequence, and linkage of monosaccharides to elucidate their parent polysaccharide structures. The monosaccharide composition analysis, capable of the absolute quantitation of 14 plant monosaccharides, was performed on over 1000 foods to build a Food Carbohydrate Encyclopedia, which encompasses natural produce, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, dairy, and mushrooms, as well as processed products, including beverages, snacks, and fermented foods. The method employs 96-well plate hydrolysis and derivatization procedures followed by a 10-minute ultra-high performance liquid chromatography paired with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry analysis. This platform enables the analysis of over 100 samples to be performed within two days. Our high throughput approach offers the opportunity to study food carbohydrates on a large scale for the first time. Even though foods are traditionally assumed to comprise of only a few common monosaccharides, such as glucose, fructose and galactose, our results indicate that many foods have extremely diverse compositions that can contain high amounts of xylose, arabinose, and several other monosaccharides. We use statistical techniques to organize the food encyclopedia based upon their carbohydrate homology. This encyclopedia does not only serve as a database that expands far beyond the current knowledge of food compositions, but also offers a new approach to designing specialized diets, personalized health, and microbiome manipulation.

Utilization of a rapid-throughput monosaccharide analysis for the development of a food carbohydrate encyclopedia

2019 Spring National Meeting

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