Nutella - Does it have hazelnuts by Proteomics Mass Spec Everything

[00:00:00]We have the Nutella. You know, I'm wondering, does this even contain hazelnuts? It says it's 13% hazelnuts.

[00:00:07]It just seems like talk. I mean, this is going to be some cool results, guys.

[00:00:10]I'll scoop there of the hazelnut spread.

[00:00:13]You know, I'm also doing Jif peanut butter data not shown as like a control and then hazelnut. And we're just going to solubilize these guys before doing the acetonitrile zinc sulfate precipitation method. Our regular proteomics, get out as much of the protein as we can, crash it, digest it, put it onto the Zevo Q Exactive. My Nutella proteomics data pulled into peaks here. We're just getting right to it, guys. You can see we got the hits.

[00:00:40]It's a lot of bovine casein. We pulled over here. You can see that we got good maps on bovine casein. Uh actually really cool. We are seeing theobromine cacao. Uh two different proteins. Only one peptide each, but we are seeing the 21 kilodalton seed storage protein theobromine cacao and this vicilin protein, another seed protein from cacao. Uh and then a lot of casein milk proteins all from cow.

[00:01:07]So, we got cacao and we got cow. But the one thing that is absent that we are seeing none of is hazelnut. And uh you know, I did a kind of a weird control here. We did the uh Jif peanut butter control to make sure that my method can isolate uh nut proteins from these butters, heavily processed butters, right? And so, there is the Jif peanut butter control and you can see really good coverage, 100% nuts, all peanuts. This Arachis hypogaea is the peanut. And you can see the coverage on these peanut proteins are excellent, very soluble.

[00:01:47]82%, 62%. So, I feel like if there were nuts in this hazelnut spread, I would have gotten them. I think they're going to have to rename this tip to like chocolate spread. Not not seeing a lot of hazelnut.

[00:02:01]>> All right, but I'm still not convinced.

[00:02:03]All right, guys, I have to be sure. So, I've now pulled into a fasta file all the European hazelnut proteome, which is the largest one, I think. And now we're just going to search hazelnuts only.

[00:02:17]So, can I find hazelnuts in the spread?

[00:02:18]I mean, it's definitely low because I didn't find them on the first pass.

[00:02:22]Um but uh can I find any any remnants of hazelnuts in this spread?

[00:02:28]All right, thank goodness. So, I did the Nutella, but I searched the hazelnut proteome only, and you can see we do have peptides that match to coverage of hazelnut 11S globulin seed storage protein. So, I can confirm that we do have some minor hazelnut in the hazelnut spread, the Nutella. But if you look at these peptides, right, you can see that the most intense area 1E to the five for the best peptide, most intense peptide in the sample here, um if we go back and do so the Nutella when I just searched the general proteome, and I was seeing mainly milk proteins and a little bit of chocolate proteins, these peptides are up in the 1E to the six, like an order of magnitude higher in intensity.

[00:03:22]Um so, I see that like uh the hazelnut's more of a minor ingredient than a major ingredient in Nutella spread. And I'd say that it's more of like a I would call it like uh chocolate milk spread with a sprinkling of hazelnuts.