New insights into structures and composition of plant food materials

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to review principles and potential application of micro-proton induced X-ray emission (micro-PIXE), synchrotron-based micro-X-ray fluorescence (micro-XRF) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) hyphenated with pulsed laser ablation (LA) for analysing plants and plant materials to elucidate feature of constituensts of nutritional value. These are required in order to develop novel high-quality functional and other food products in view of the variability of properties of plant tissues and products.