Foodomics was defined as a discipline that studies the food and nutrition domains through the application and integration of advanced omics technologies to improve consumers' well-being, health, and confidence. In particular is an emerging field within omics sciences dealing with the simultaneous determination and quantitative analysis of intracellular metabolites, which have been defined as low-molecular-mass compounds that are not genetically encoded and produced modified by the metabolism of living organisms including microbes those compounds small molecules such as peptides amino acids nucleic carbohydrates organic vitamins polyphenols alkaloids minerals.

Although metabolic foot printing gives important information about only a small part of the entire bacterial metabolome, it provides key information that may contribute to the understanding of cell communication mechanisms. In fact, metabolomics has recently been applied for monitoring the quality, processing, chemical and microbiological safety of both raw materials and final products to improve the consumers' health and confidence. Moreover metabolomics may be applied in fermented foods to observe metabolite modifications during fermentation and the possibility to predict, among others, the sensory and nutritional quality of the fermented final product. Since the crucial roles in the success and safety of food industry, microbial functions in food are increasingly attracted researchers' interest. The emerged foodomics approaches that integrated advanced high-throughput analytical techniques and bioinformatics tools have been used in modern food microbiology. In fact, two analytical platforms are currently used for metabolomic analyses: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (MS). They have achieved success in revealing many fundamental processes driven by both pathogens and commensals in food. The suggested session focuses on the application of foodomics in food microbiology in order to clarify basic concepts and their application to food safety, quality and food fermentation.

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