Genes Nutr (2013) 8:1–4
DOI 10.1007/s12263-012-0310-x
COMMENTARY
Foodomics: a new comprehensive approach to food and nutrition
Francesco Capozzi • Alessandra Bordoni
Received: 31 July 2012 / Accepted: 2 August 2012 / Published online: 30 August 2012
Ó Springer-Verlag 2012
Abstract In the past 20 years, the scientific community has energy sources to the recognition of their role in main-
faced a great development in different fields due to the taining health and in reducing the risk of diseases.
development of high-throughput, omics technologies. Start- The importance of food for human health is not a new
ing from the four major types of omics measurements concept, considering Hippocrates’s sentence ‘‘Let food be
(genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics), thy medicine and medicine be thy food’’; the recent pro-
a variety of omics subdisciplines (epigenomics, lipidomics, gresses in analytical methods allowed scientists to dem-
interactomics, metallomics, diseasomics, etc.) has emerged. onstrate the role of food in human health, and not to simply
Thanks to the omics approach, researchers are now facing the hypothesize it. So, according to another Hippocrates’s
possibility of connecting food components, foods, the diet, sentence ‘‘There are in fact two things, science and opin-
the individual, the health, and the diseases, but this broad ion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance’’,
vision needs not only the application of advanced technolo- nowadays we are not simply thinking that a good diet is
gies, but mainly the ability of looking at the problem with important for health, but we can demonstrate it, evidencing
a different approach, a ‘‘foodomics approach’’. Foodomics the mechanisms underlying these health effects.
is the comprehensive, high-throughput approach for the In recent years, food science greatly grew as well, devel-
exploitation of food science in the light of an improvement of oping new food products, designing processes to produce
human nutrition. Foodomics is a new approach to food and these foods, improving packaging materials, food shelf-life,
nutrition that studies the food domain as a whole with the and sensory characteristics. Food chemistry, devoted to the
nutrition domain to reach the main objective, the optimization evaluation of the molecular composition of food and the
of human health and well-being. involvement of these molecules in chemical reactions, food
physical chemistry, which studies both physical and chemical
Keywords Foodomics Omics technologies interactions in foods, and food microbiology also took great
Food science Human nutrition advantages from the new analytical methods.
Even though the readers of this journal are supposed to
be more than familiar with these terms, let us introduce
Human nutrition science has greatly developed in the past what we mean by the term ‘‘new analytical methods’’.
decades, turning from the consideration of foods as simply New analytical methods are mainly related to the holistic
omics approach, implemented by ‘‘high-throughput’’ tech-
nologies. High-throughput refers to a technology in which a
large (or even exhaustive) number of measurements can be
Special section: ‘‘Foodomics’’; Guest Editors Drs A. Bordoni and taken in a fairly short time period. ‘‘Ome’’ and ‘‘omics’’ are
F. Capozzi suffixes that are derived from ‘‘genome’’, a term created by
Hans Winkler in 1920, although the use of ome is older,
F. Capozzi A. Bordoni (&)
signifying a homogeneous set of items as a whole.
Department of Food Sciences, University of Bologna,
Piazza Goidanich, 60, 47521 Cesena, FC, Italy Although four major types of high-throughput omics
e-mail: [Link]@[Link] measurements are commonly performed (genomics,
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2 Genes Nutr (2013) 8:1–4
transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics), a variety of Foodomics is the comprehensive, high-throughput
omics sub-disciplines (epigenomics, lipidomics, interacto- approach for the exploitation of food science in the light of
mics, metallomics, diseasomics, etc.) have begun to emerge, an improvement of human nutrition.
each with their own set of instruments, techniques, reagents Foodomics has been previously defined as a discipline
and software. that studies the Food and Nutrition domains through the
Transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics are all application of omics technologies. In this context, nutri-
dynamic domains, as affected by interactions between genomics and nutrigenetics have been considered as a part
the organism and external stimuli. The human being (the of the more general foodomics term (Cifuentes 2009).
organism) can be affected by the diet (the external stimuli), In our opinion, foodomics studies the food domain as
that can intervene in a positive or negative way on the risk a whole with the nutrition domain, applying the same
of occurrence of certain human diseases. But the diet is advanced omics technologies to different samples, and
made of foods, and foods originate from living organisms, integrates all results in order to have an overall vision
and can in turn be affected by external stimuli such as allowing the improvement of health and well-being.
different agricultural and transforming technologies. Thus, Indeed, food science and nutrition science can apply
to reach the final goal of improving human health, we need the same omics technologies to different samples. Besides
to consider all these possible dynamic interactions in an the concept of biological sample in omics technology,
omics approach. already elucidated by Morrison et al. (2006), the same
Thanks to the omics approach, researchers are now high-throughput analysis can be used in both food science
facing a new science which in theory can connect food and nutrition science. In human nutrition, genomics (the
components, foods, the diet, the individual, the health and comprehensive analysis of DNA structure and function) is
the diseases. In practice, we are still far from this con- the scientific field of the genetic basis for the diverse
nection, which needs not only technologies but mainly a responses to foods (and not the secret to personalizing diet
broad vision of the problem, since there are many actors and health; German et al. 2011); in food science it is the
playing the comedy. A broad vision means not only a broad opportunity for improving our understanding of the history
expertise and the application of advanced technologies, but of plant domestication and to accelerate crop improvement
also the ability of looking at the problem with a different (Morrell et al. 2011).
approach, a ‘‘foodomics approach’’. Transcriptomics allows to evidence the modulation of
Foodomics received the interest of scientists with dif- the global gene expression profile by different nutrients,
ferent cultural background since 2009, at the time of correlating it to disease prevention (Bordoni et al. 2007),
the first international conference held in Cesena, Italy and to design microbial mitigation strategies for ready-to-
([Link]). The purpose of that conference was to eat food products (Soni et al. 2011). Proteomics can greatly
promote a multidisciplinary environment where specialists contribute to food safety (D’Alessandro and Zolla 2012) as
in omics sciences were invited to contribute to the holistic well to the prevention of cancer by food bioactives (Shukla
definition of food and to trace a possible way to exploit this and George 2011). Last but not least, metabolomics,
view in the nutrition field. the systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints
Food is a highly complex mixture and, with such com- that specific cellular processes leave behind, is rapidly
plexity, its definition cannot be based only on preselected becoming a fundamental approach in food science (Hong
components. Moreover, its conventional definition, per- 2011) and in nutrition science as well (Puiggròs et al.
formed by a compositional analysis, is often affected by the 2011).
extractive methods that, in turn, may not resemble the phys- Technologies such as mass spectrometry (MS) or nuclear
iological environment where the molecules will become bio- magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, can be used to
available. In fact, paying attention to particular components characterize genetically modified crops (Garcı́a-Cañas et al.
or methods, some chemical characteristics could be empha- 2011) as well as in studies aimed to improve health of
sized more than others, even if the latter may be more individuals through diet (Rezzi et al. 2007), but they can
important to the food-human interaction point of view and to also give new answers to old, unraveling questions such as
the health perspective. Equally, focusing our attention on the food digestibility (Bordoni et al. 2011).
effect of specific nutrients on defined metabolic pathways we In this respect, also the traditional investigation tech-
are at risk of forgetting the effect of the whole food on the niques are experiencing a new age, since their integration
whole human organism. To overcome this limit, the food- with bio-informatics tools are putting a new light on the
human interaction needs a higher definition for both sides, experimental data. The optimization of algorithms for gen-
and foodomics responds to the challenge to achieve this aim. ome-, proteome- and metabolome-wide statistical analyses
Thus, foodomics is not the food science-related coun- are crucial tasks to exploit fully the potentials coming from
terpart of the nutrition science-related nutrigenomics. the omics information.
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Genes Nutr (2013) 8:1–4 3
This holds particularly for NMR, which provides Finally, the article by Montoliu et al. (2012) offers an
spectral data that could be considered, as a whole, the overview on the opportunity offered by the determination
molecular profile of the sample and, for this, can mirror the of the system-wide (i.e., whole organism) biochemical
whole metabolome present in the sample. Several appli- effects of diets on individuals’ metabolism, by unraveling
cations of NMR metabonomics, recently appeared in lit- the interactions in the complex mosaic of both genomic
erature, represent the opportunity to describe heterogeneity and meta-genomic (i.e., gut microbiota) network. The
among food sources by looking at the effect of different evolution of gene-metabolism researches, from single-
production practices on the whole metabolic pattern, rather gene/single-metabolite studies to genome wide association
than focusing on specific metabolites (Savorani et al. 2010; studies (GWAS), made it possible to perform unbiased
Picone et al. 2011a, b). searches of the entire human genome to identify all com-
The suitability of NMR metabonomics, as a general mon genetic factors that affect the holistic metabolomics
approach to evaluate the substantial chemical equivalence phenotypes.
of wild type and GMOs grapes, emerges from a study In conclusion, given that the development and applica-
which compared different cultivars of Vitis vinifera tion of advanced omics methodologies and bioinformatics
receiving a different number of the same exogenous gene, has contributed to the investigation of topics considered
by looking at the changes occurring in the metabolic phe- unapproachable few years ago, they represent the tools and
notype (metabotype; Picone et al. 2011a, b). not the scope, and the foodomics is much more than a
The increasing interest for the foodomics science further application of analytical methods. Foodomics is a
encouraged the organizers to reiterate the same interna- new approach to food and nutrition, foodomics is a new
tional conference on 2011, and four invited speakers are science and a challenge to be faced leaving old concepts
contributing with representative articles to the present apart. In the foodomics field, researchers working in food
special section hosted by Gene and Nutrition. Now, few chemistry, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, microbiol-
words to introduce the contributions. ogy, molecular biology, food technology, clinical sciences,
The article by Pérez-Massot et al. (2012) deals with the and human can finally work together, with an omics
possibility of counteracting malnutrition by genetic engi- approach, to reach the main objective, the optimization of
neering of staple crops, reviewing and discussing strategies human health and well-being.
for enhancing crop content of different nutrients. The
authors also consider major constrains, that is, the risk Conflict of interest None.
assessments, that are at the basis of EU policies and reg-
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