Enterotoxinomics: The omic sciences in the study of staphylococcal toxins analyzed in food matrices

Foodomics covers all several disciplines related with emerging working areas and relies on them to get a broader knowledge about food quality and food safety to improve consumer's well-being, health and confidence. Enterotoxin-producing S. aureus is one of the most common causes of food-borne human illness throughout the world. Because of the possible significance of these enterotoxins for public health and food safety, greater knowledge of their occurrence and an efficient means of screening at the protein level are needed. It is under these circumstances where Enterotoxinomic science has an important role. The term Enterotoxinomics refers to the omic sciences applied to enterotoxin detection and their advantages or disadvantages and deals with major achievements and recent discoveries in protein toxins produced by bacteria. Nowadays research in food science is moving from classical methodologies to more advanced strategies. The increasing popularity of proteomics has created a need for quantitative analysis methods. As a result, many different techniques are now available for performing gel-based or gel-free quantitative proteomics. At present, mass spectrometry (MS) represents the most-powerful tool in proteomics because it requires no prior knowledge of the proteins to be identified. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of all the omic sciences applied to enterotoxin detection including their advantages or disadvantages. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.