Jürgen Kroll, Sascha Rohn, Harshadrai Manilal Rawel

• The application of mass spectrometry for the characterization of food proteins represents one of the most important tools in food chemistry and nutritional science. In the last few years there has been a tremendous development in the classical questions with regard to determination of molecular mass, identification amino acid sequence and structure of proteins. With these technical improvements, it is becoming more and more interesting to characterize the changes involved in proteins embedded in the food matrix as a result of their technological processing, especially in terms of the influence on their functional, nutritional and phsiological properties. Many such posttransational protein modifications occuring due to reactions with other food constituents (e.g. secondary plant metabolites) provide a series of possible fields for application of a sample preparation with a soft ionisation technique using mass spectrometry. The matrix assisted laser desorptions/ionisation ? time of flight ? mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) and theThe application of mass spectrometry for the characterization of food proteins represents one of the most important tools in food chemistry and nutritional science. In the last few years there has been a tremendous development in the classical questions with regard to determination of molecular mass, identification amino acid sequence and structure of proteins. With these technical improvements, it is becoming more and more interesting to characterize the changes involved in proteins embedded in the food matrix as a result of their technological processing, especially in terms of the influence on their functional, nutritional and phsiological properties. Many such posttransational protein modifications occuring due to reactions with other food constituents (e.g. secondary plant metabolites) provide a series of possible fields for application of a sample preparation with a soft ionisation technique using mass spectrometry. The matrix assisted laser desorptions/ionisation ? time of flight ? mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) and the surface enhanced laser desorptions/ionisation ? time of flight ? mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS) have become since than two of the most important methods of choice for solving of such questions and these both techniques have been described here with correponding examples.…