**Claudio Medana**

Molecular Biotechnology and Health Sciences Department, Università degli Studi di Torino, Via Pietro Giuria 5, 10125 Torino, Italy; claudio.medana@unito.it

Received: 4 February 2020; Accepted: 4 April 2020; Published: 8 April 2020

Food chemical analysis is recognized as a unique tool for the characterization of nutritional value, quality and safety of foods and feeds. It is of growing importance to have an accurate knowledge of the global chemical composition of food and in particular of the chemical entities known as molecular (bio)markers. Quantitative determination of chemical markers is needed for risk assessment both in food and in environmental research after toxicological characterization of natural and synthetic chemicals. The potential adverse e ffects of chemical species, i.e., their hazard, can be classified as acute, subacute, subchronic and chronic. However, in all cases, the risk managemen<sup>t</sup> does refine the toxicological evaluation by the chemical quantitation and the toxicokinetic assessment.

On these bases, we proposed this special issue, in order to have a view on emerging analytical methodologies to perform toxicology marker determination.

The drive from the grea<sup>t</sup> development of methods in the industrial, pharmaceutical and environmental fields has extended the impact of chromatographic, spectrometric and spectroscopic techniques to the study of composition and contamination of foods. The interdisciplinary nature of analytical laboratories has allowed the extension of existing applications to the targeted and untargeted measurement of minor food components. These molecules are useful as toxicity biomarkers and in describing contamination in general.

This special issue contains a limited anthology of these kind of methods, but is highly representative of a broad worldwide overview, by collecting authors from ten di fferent countries and four continents. Very di fferent analytes are described, from volatile compounds to heavy metals and from highly polar substances to classical heterocyclic and organic aromatic contaminants. A large variety of analytical techniques is represented, including sample preparation and clean-up methodologies; the main current chromatographic-hyphenated spectroscopies together with mass spectrometry are more frequently reported. Finally, a di fferentiated variety of foods was the subject of the presented works: meat, fishery products, fruits and miscellaneous beverages are included in the studied matrices. Some applications of foods that require special care, such as infant formulae and human breast milk, are also presented.

Summarizing the highlights of this special issue:



were validated and shown to be suitable to detect the illicit managemen<sup>t</sup> of fishery products with hydrogen peroxide [11].

In summary, this collection of research articles provides a valuable selection of tools for food investigators to compare analytical methodologies and applications useful in the evaluation of toxicity markers.
