Risk Assessment of Activity, Transformation and Metabolism of Food Constituents and Contaminants

Dear Colleagues,

Foods notoriously include a vast variety of compounds of different origin, ranging to low-molecular-weight molecules to proteins and peptides, which may exert adverse effects on living organisms at many different levels. The list of potentially harmful compounds includes contaminants of both anthropic and natural origin, as well as food constituents which may threaten human health and wellbeing, such as allergens and alkaloids naturally present in certain food matrices used as ingredients and anti-nutritional compounds, to cite but a few. Food processing may also increase the complexity of chemical mixtures in processed foods, possibly extending the number of potentially harmful compounds. In addition, compounds with adverse effects co-occur in food with an equally wide number of health-protecting compounds. The whole chemical complexity is crucial to determine the overall effects on living organisms based on the combined action, such as additive, antagonistic and synergistic effects, that these chemicals are likely to exert on each other.

In this scenario, the risk assessment of food compounds requires i) their precise detection and quantification in various food matrices to provide data for exposure assessment; as well as ii) the investigation of their activity at diverse levels of complexity (i.e., from the molecular level to the whole organism), taking into account the metabolic transformations and those arising from food processing, which may modify the activity/toxicity of parent compounds; and iii) the study of the toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics, being crucial to properly assess the risks to humans.

This Special Issue is intended to collect original research papers, meta-analyses and reviews on those aspects with emphasis on innovative methods (including NAMs—new alternative methodologies) and on the evaluation of emerging threats and mixtures towards effective risk assessment studies.

Dr. Luca Dellafiora
Prof. Dr. Martina Cirlini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• food contaminant
• food bioactive
• risk assessment
• chemical mixture
• food safety
• xenobiotic metabolism
• toxicokinetics
• toxicodynamics
• combined action
• metabolomics