Revisiting the chemical diversity of organic food crops: metabolomics perspectives

Abstract

Organic foods have become popular, with growing attention to healthier, safer foods. Yet, the comprehensive knowledge of chemical composition and metabolic network rewiring in organic food crops remains limited, hindering a thorough understanding of their nutritional values and health effects. This study investigates chemical truth behind organic production and knowledge gaps and proposes metabolomics as a tool to systemically explore the chemical diversity of organic food crops. Three essential tasks using metabolomics are given to achieve the goal. Based on previously published literature on organic crop metabolomics research, one of the suggested tasks, functional enrichment analysis was applied to demonstrate its usefulness for the identification of metabolic network and the necessity of future research on organic food crops. The proposed actions will be a breakthrough to better understand the overall metabolism and quality traits of organic foods, thereby contributing to the quality assurance, authentication, and traceability of organic food products.