Frontiers and Prospects of New Technologies for Structural Analysis of Food-Derived Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates not only provide the main source of energy for humans,but also have important functions such as maintaining intestinal health,regulating blood sugar and cholesterol levels,promoting metabolism,and supporting the immune system.Therefore,exploring the precise structure-activity relationship of foodborne carbohydrates has become an important scientific problem.However,compared to genomics and proteomics,the inherent structural diversity and com-plexity of foodborne carbohydrates pose a major challenge to their study,which lags far behind that of proteins and lipid macromolecules.Based on this,this review focuses on the breakthrough of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry(LC-MS),ion mobility mass spectrometry(IM-MS)and low-temperature infrared spectroscopy in the analysis of food-borne sugar chains on the basis of classical sugar chain analysis methods,and further discusses the application of the latest computer processing methods and analysis techniques in the analysis of foodborne sugar chain.This review not only aims to gain a deeper understanding of strategies for foodborne carbohydrate analysis,but also looks at future trends leading to high-throughput,accurate foodborne sugar bioinformatics.