Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies

A special issue of Foods (ISSN 2304-8158). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Physics and (Bio)Chemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2025 | Viewed by 561

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Applied Chemistry, Kogakuin University, 2665–1 Nakano-Machi, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0015, Japan
Interests: food chemistry; volatiles; food aroma; flavor analysis; flavor-omics; volatilomics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The character of food aroma and flavor, determined by volatile compounds, derives from the product’s freshness, cooked, fermented, or processed condition, affecting our preference. Therefore, volatile flavor compound composition directly determines the quality of each type of food. It is impossible to infer the aroma characteristics of a food product from the quantitative differences in specific flavor compounds, because flavor is composed of a mixture of flavor compounds with different aroma characteristics and odor thresholds. This indicates that it is also necessary to conduct component complexity analyses of foods to clarify their quality. Additionally, the emission of volatile flavor compounds varies both spatially and spatiotemporally, depending on the condition of the food in question. Therefore, capturing dynamic changes in volatile composition is also necessary for food characterization.

This Special Issue, entitled “Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies", will focus on new findings on food volatile flavor compounds, using recent analytical technologies such as volatilomics, real-time analysis, and other methods. Studies employing high-speed or high-sensitivity analytical techniques for food volatiles and high-throughput food sample preparation methods are also welcome.

This Special Issue aims to collect a wide range of information on the latest innovative analytical methods and their application in the analysis of volatile flavor compounds in foods.

Prof. Dr. Yoko Iijima
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • food flavor volatiles
  • volatile analysis
  • mass spectrometry
  • solid extraction
  • flavor-omics
  • volatilomics
  • sensory evaluation

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 3543 KiB  
Article
Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS
by Takayoshi Tanaka, Junhan Zhang, Shuntaro Isoya, Tatsuro Maeda, Kazuya Hasegawa and Tetsuya Araki
Foods 2025, 14(15), 2751; https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751 - 6 Aug 2025
Viewed by 316
Abstract
Cooked-rice aroma strongly affects consumer choice, yet the chemical traits distinguishing glutinous rice from normal-amylose japonica rice remain underexplored because earlier studies targeted only a few dozen volatiles using one-dimensional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this study, four glutinous and seven normal Japanese [...] Read more.
Cooked-rice aroma strongly affects consumer choice, yet the chemical traits distinguishing glutinous rice from normal-amylose japonica rice remain underexplored because earlier studies targeted only a few dozen volatiles using one-dimensional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this study, four glutinous and seven normal Japanese cultivars were cooked under identical conditions, their headspace volatiles trapped with MonoTrap and qualitatively profiled by comprehensive GC × GC-TOFMS. The two-dimensional platform resolved 1924 peaks—about ten-fold previous coverage—and, together with hierarchical clustering, PCA, heatmap visualization and volcano plots, cleanly separated the starch classes (78.3% cumulative PCA variance; Euclidean distance > 140). Volcano plots highlighted 277 compounds enriched in the glutinous cultivars and 295 in Koshihikari, including 270 compounds that were not previously documented in rice. Normal cultivars were dominated by ethers, aldehydes, amines and other nitrogenous volatiles associated with grainy, grassy and toasty notes. Glutinous cultivars showed abundant ketones, furans, carboxylic acids, thiols, steroids, nitro compounds, pyrroles and diverse hydrocarbons and aromatics, yielding sweeter, fruitier and floral accents. These results expand the volatile library for japonica rice, provide molecular markers for flavor-oriented breeding and demonstrate the power of GC × GC-TOFMS coupled with chemometrics for grain aroma research. Full article
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