Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a simple, rapid, and sensitive analytical technique that has been employed in a number of scientific disciplines (e.g., chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, material science, polymer science, environmental science, and metallurgy) for almost two decades. LIBS became vastly popular in industry, especially in steel, automobile, and aircraft manufacturing due to the availability of portable instruments and rapid analysis. As the technique can be employed for simultaneously analyzing both light and heavy elements, LIBS has attracted global attention for its food analysis capabilities to characterize micronutrients, essential constituents, and toxicants present in food items. No other technique provides such comprehensive analytical data in a short period of time without any substantial sample treatment. This paper reviews applications of LIBS for food analysis in recent years and discusses its potential to advance the characterization of components in food.

The cultivated strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa (Fragaria spp.) is the most economically important global soft fruit. Phytophthora cactorum, a water-borne oomycete causes economic losses in strawberry production globally. A bi-parental cross of octoploid cultivated strawberry segregating for resistance to P. cactorum, the causative agent of crown rot disease, was screened using artificial inoculation. Multiple putative resistance quantitative trait loci (QTL) were identified and mapped. Three major effect QTL (FaRPc6C, FaRPc6D and FaRPc7D) explained 37% of the variation observed. There were no epistatic interactions detected between the three major QTLs. Testing a subset of the mapping population progeny against a range of P. cactorum isolates revealed no significant interaction (p = 0.0593). However, some lines showed higher susceptibility than predicted, indicating that additional undetected factors may affect the expression of some quantitative resistance loci. Using historic crown rot disease score data from strawberry accessions, a preliminary genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 114 individuals revealed an additional locus associated with resistance to P. cactorum. Mining of the Fragaria vesca Hawaii 4 v1.1 genome revealed candidate resistance genes in the QTL regions.