Metabolomics in plant-food studies: Influence of cultivation latitude on the secondary metabolites of broccoli

The health-related and sensory properties of fruits and vegetables are strongly influenced by biotic and abiotic growth conditions as well as storage and preparation. LC-MS based metabolomics is a powerful tool to monitor the quality of foods through the whole production chain. We have established a metabolomics platform that uses an UHPLC-HR-ESI-qToF (Agilent) for LC-MS analyses followed by data mining in MassProfiler Professional (Agilent) and multivariate statistics in both The Unscrambler (Camo) and R (R Core Team). With this setup, we studied quantitative changes in secondary metabolite profiles for broccoli grown under controlled soil and water conditions at four different latitudes in Europe (Northern and Southern Norway, Germany and Spain). The aim was to determine which secondary plant metabolites would be influenced most by the different rowing conditions.