Illuminating Dark Matter (KB-57-001-001)

In today’s rapidly changing world, early identification of emerging substances in food and agriculture is essential to mitigate health, environmental, and economic risks. High resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS/MS) enables broad and reliable chemical screening, yet most detected compounds remain unidentified due to missing reference spectra—so-called “chemical dark matter.” 

To address this, Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR) developed the Food Safety Mass Spectral Library, a public resource containing high-quality data for over 1,000 relevant substances. Notably, 22% of these compounds are absent in other open access spectral libraries, underlining its unique value. Researchers from 41 countries across academia, government, and industry have already adopted the spectral library, confirming its practical importance. 

However, many substances of interest — such as polar substances, natural compounds, marine toxins, and persistent environmental pollutants — are not yet included. Expanding the spectral library to cover compounds studied across Wageningen University & Research (WUR) domains would accelerate identification of contaminants, natural metabolites, and transformation products. This would support more reliable analyses, earlier interventions for safety issues, and new opportunities related to beneficial metabolites. Therefore, in this project, the WFSR spectral library will be expanded to include a broader range of substances relevant to research groups across WUR. 

Moreover, as proof of principle, the WFSR spectral library will be linked to public databases in this project. Using tools like MASST (a large, curated online repository containing analytical data), the presence of WFSR compounds can be tracked across thousands of real-world samples (e.g. food, water, soil, tissues). Such applications would strengthen food safety monitoring in the Netherlands and could be scaled across WUR to map emerging substances more broadly, revealing both risks and research opportunities.