Evaluating the Metabolic Perturbations in the Mango Samples

Malnutrition, food safety, and public health are a major global issue. Several strides have been made in this regard. Consumption of fruits is recommended because of their antioxidant properties for the present lifestyle and fruits are the class of food which can found naturally with a variety of nutritive values and best food for all. Among fruits, Mango (Mangifera indica L. ) belongs to the family of Anacardiaceae, and it is known as the king of fruits, because of its immense potency of nutritional components and the health value of regular consumption.

Generally, the quality of the fruit assessed by nutritive values, but nowadays, during purchase the consumer assess the quality based on various external and internal factors of fruit such as visual and sensory observations like firmness, shape, size, ripen, aroma, shelf life, taste and are correlates well with the quality. Finally, the quality of fruit is decided by fruit ripening. Since fruit quality directly proportional to the metabolite content and significant changes in biochemical parameters takes place during ripening. Ripening is a sequential phase and this is the stage fruit looks palatable. But ripening of mango is beset with a number of problems like different artificial ripening processes. In recent times, a major concern is raised about the artificial ripening of fruits. According to Dhembare et al. , (2013) there are about fifteen (or more) artificial ripeners are available. Though the artificial ripeners stated as carcinogenic but to reach the economic value the usage of these chemicals propelled as a quick buck syndrome.

Some of those artificial ripeners like calcium carbide and ethylene are widely used to enhance the ripening process but they are causing effect on fruit quality, and also appears health issues like memory loss, cerebral edema, colonic, prostates, pancreas, stomach and lung cancer, DNA, RNA and hematological changes, thereby we hypothesized that the artificial ripeners affecting somewhere the sequential phase of ripening and finally there is an impediment in the level of metabolites. Very few attempts are made to understand mechanistic aspects of fruit ripening to evaluate the effect of artificial ripening on it but still remained obscure. Metabolomics is the measurement of ideally all metabolites under defined temporal conditions is an emerging approach to identify and evaluate the metabolic perturbations in the metabolism (either plant or animal) due to xenobiotic exposure. Metabolomics found wide applications in understanding the food quality and safety.

The measurement of metabolites can able to directly predict the physiological milieu as these are the end products of cellular, molecular and biochemical processes. Currently, metabolomics paving the way to develop various frontier technologies and also helps in establishing marker metabolites for xenobiotic exposure. The metabolomics has the potential to become an ideal tool for diverse fields of research to bring revolutionary solutions for fundamental questions.

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is arguably the well suited and popular analytical platform for quantitative and qualitative metabolomics. GC-MS offers an advantage to analyze large number samples with greater precision, accuracy and resolution due to use of capillary columns and only inert gas as a carrier gas. It can easily separate the closest peaks with high reliability and reproducibility, thus, possess a greater advantage for untargeted metabolomic studies.

In the present communication, an attempt has been made to use GC-MS based metabolomics to identify the metabolic perturbations in the fruit (mango) samples exposed to artificial ripeners such as ethylene gas (C2H4) and calcium carbide (CaC2) in comparison to room temperature ripening (RTR) (control samples). The present work also discusses about the pathways affected due to artificial ripening and their health implications.