Recent Advances in Identification of Functional Ingredients in Food
A special issue of Foods (ISSN 2304-8158). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Nutrition".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 September 2026 | Viewed by 167
Special Issue Editor
Interests: antioxidant activity; food bioactives; bioaccessibility/bioavailability; 2D/3D cell assays (monolayers & spheroids) for cytotoxicity; functional foods; probiotics; intestinal barrier transport; host–microbiome interactions
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Health-oriented foods increasingly rely on functional ingredients with proven physiological benefits. This Special Issue, “Recent Advances in Identification of Functional Ingredients in Food,” welcomes research and reviews that discover, characterise, and validate bioactive compounds across diverse matrices—plants, edible fungi and algae, edible insects, microbial biomass, and upcycled by-products. We encourage studies linking advanced analytics (targeted/untargeted metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics) with biological relevance, including in vitro digestion, bioaccessibility/bioavailability assessment, and cell-based models (2D monolayers, 3D spheroids, organoids), as well as animal or clinical evidence where available.
Particular emphasis is placed on how processing and biotechnology (fermentation, enzymology, germination, encapsulation, formulation) shape functionality, and on factors that limit efficacy, such as antinutritional compounds (phytates, oxalates, tannins, protease inhibitors) and contaminants/process contaminants (e.g., mycotoxins, heavy metals, acrylamide, PAHs) that impair stability, transport, or utilisation of bioactives. We particularly welcome studies employing advanced analytical platforms—LC–MS/MS, GC–MS, high-resolution MS (untargeted/suspect screening), NMR, and complementary chemometrics/multivariate analysis—with robust QA/QC, reference materials, and inter-laboratory comparability.
In addition, we welcome contributions that explicitly integrate AI- and data-driven discovery, reflecting the strong current trend of using machine learning and artificial intelligence to accelerate bioactive substance identification, prioritisation, and functionality prediction from complex analytical and multi-omics datasets.
We also encourage studies addressing precision nutrition and interindividual variability in response to functional ingredients, including the roles of genetics, gut microbiome enterotypes, and lifestyle factors, and exploring functional ingredients in the context of precision/personalized nutrition.
While this Special Issue covers a broad range of established bioactives, we also welcome work on emerging classes of functional ingredients, such as postbiotics and paraprobiotics, peptide-based bioactive substances (including cryptic peptides and peptides derived from fermentation), food-derived glycoconjugates and extracellular vesicles, and redox-active metabolites beyond classical antioxidants.
We invite original articles, short communications, and systematic or critical reviews that apply transparent statistics and reproducible workflows to support comparability and facilitate the translation of findings into functional foods and nutraceuticals.
Dr. Ivo Doskocil
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- functional ingredients
- bioactive compounds
- AI-driven discovery
- precision nutrition
- interindividual variability
- gut microbiome
- postbiotics
- peptide-based bioactives
- extracellular vesicles
- in vitro digestion
- bioaccessibility/bioavailability
- LC–MS/MS
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