Food Chemistry: Analytical Methods and Detection Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Food chemistry plays a fundamental role in understanding the complex interactions between food components, nutritional quality, and human health. Driven by increasing consumer demand for healthy and functional foods, the modern food chemistry research paradigm places immense emphasis on advanced analytical and detection techniques. These technologies are crucial not only for quantifying nutrient composition and bioactive compounds, but also for evaluating their bioaccessibility, stability, and biological functionality during processing and digestion.

This Special Issue, titled "Food Chemistry: Analytical Methods and Detection Technologies", aims to provide a broad and high-impact platform to highlight recent breakthroughs in analytical methods and characterization technologies across all domains of food science, with a primary focus on food nutrition, functional chemistry, and health-promoting ingredients. We warmly welcome the contribution of high-quality original research articles and comprehensive reviews.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Analysis of Bioactive Compounds & Functional Nutrients: Innovative chromatographic (LC-MS, GC-MS), spectroscopic, and extraction techniques for identifying, quantifying, and characterizing polyphenols, polysaccharides, bioactive peptides, lipids, vitamins, and probiotics.

In Vitro Digestion, Bioaccessibility, & Health Functionality: Analytical strategies for assessing the stability, release kinetics, bioaccessibility, structural modifications, and targeted delivery of functional food components during digestion.

Omics Approaches in Nutrition & Food Chemistry: Application of foodomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, and proteomics to map nutrient profiles, metabolic fate, and nutritional mechanisms of functional ingredients.

Food Quality, Flavor, & Processing Chemistry: Chemical profiling and sensing techniques (e.g., electronic nose/tongue, optical sensors, NMR, NIR) for analyzing flavor compounds, oxidation products, physical–chemical stability, and quality changes during processing and storage.

Novel Biosensors & Rapid Characterization Tools: Development of portable spectroscopic devices, microfluidic chips, electrochemical assays, and biosensors for rapid screening of functional ingredients, nutritional marker detection, and food authenticity verification.

Targeted & Non-Targeted Food Safety Testing: High-throughput screening and analytical methods for pesticides, heavy metals, mycotoxins, and emerging contaminants to ensure nutritional safety and regulatory compliance.

We look forward to receiving your valuable contributions to further expand our chemical understanding of food nutrition, quality, and health.

Dr. Qiao Wang
Dr. Yan Liu
Guest Editors

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