Metabolomics approach to elucidate the importance of count size in commercial penaeid shrimps: white leg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) and black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon)

Currently, count size is applied globally as a grading standard to sell head-less shell-on farmed shrimp. Although count size does not indicate directly the quality of shrimp, the price of shrimp generally increases proportionally with the increase of shrimp size. The importance of the size of white leg shrimp has been previously reported, where a strong correlation was found between size and metabolome data. In this study, we aimed to improve the predictive power of the orthogonal projection to latent structure (OPLS) model by expanding the metabolite coverage using liquid chromatography mass-spectrometry (LC/MS) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis. The training set consisted of 11 different-sized white leg shrimps from Indonesia and was validated in a step-wise manner by introducing an independent dataset consisting of commercial shrimp from the Japanese market. The first validation set consisted of commercial white leg shrimp, resulting in standard deviation error estimation and prediction values of 1.648 and 2.617, respectively. IMP and AMP, which are metabolites responsible for the umami taste in crustaceans, showed the highest variable importance in projection (VIP) scores and positively correlated with the increase in shrimp size. The second validation was carried out to evaluate the applicability of the size-metabolome relationship to other commercial penaeid shrimp species. The commercial black tiger shrimps with count sizes of 31/40, 21/25, 16/20, and 13/15 failed to predict the size of shrimp, suggesting that the importance of size in relation to the metabolome profile was rather species-specific.