The traditional wet chemistry analysis is to use combination of specific chemical reactions to quantify a group of compounds with similar chemical and nutritional properties. However, plant cell wall complex is not uniform in terms of chemical, physical or nutritional characteristics and the digestion progress is achieved by a series of enzymatic hydrolysis of specific chemical bonds which cannot be revealed by wet chemistry analysis. Synchrotron-based and globar-sourced mid-infrared spectroscopy instead utilizing the unique absorption of mid-infrared light at different frequencies and more information about specific chemical bonds can be revealed. As a result, taking spectral change during digestion into consideration may give some insight about nutritional utilization features. However, the utilization of synchrotron-based and globar-sourced mid-infrared spectroscopy on feed and food nutritional research is limited. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide idea about how to systematically study the nutritional and spectral structure feature of faba bean with traditional and advanced synchrotron-based and globar-sourced vibrational molecular spectroscopy. The study reviews (1) Utilization of faba bean for human and animal consumption; (2) Traditional evaluation methods for faba bean nutritional characteristics and (3) Contribution of synchrotron-based and globar-sourced mid-infrared (Mid-IR) spectroscopy techniques to evaluate faba bean structural and molecular properties.
Keywords: Vibrational molecular spectroscopy; chemistry and structure; faba utilization; nutrition and structure interaction; nutritional availability.