The Future of Foodomics

When I was contacted by the editor of this magazine (Rich Whitworth), with an invitation to write an opinion article on something close to my heart, my first impulse was to decline yet another annoying demand for my time. I must admit that I was close to telling him that he should better ask for an article from any of the 100 colleagues whose work was recognized by The Analytical Scientist’s “Power List” (I was not included in that list!). However, I realized that, while the decision to create a Power List without my name was clearly not too clever, his proposal about writing on the future of foodomics was quite logical. I suddenly felt motivated.

So, let’s start from the beginning. We all enjoy good food and a pleasing beverage (water included). Now, imagine that you could enjoy a safer, higher quality, tastier meal and simultaneously improve your health, enhance your body’s defenses and fortify your homeostasis. These are the main goals of foodomics: the application of 21st century omics tools and bioinformatics to boost food science. Targets include the rapid resolution of food safety issues, the improvement of food quality and traceability, and the requirement to understand, at the molecular level, every claim regarding food bioactivity in our bodies.

Foodomics offers an especially complex challenge. A single meal presents simultaneously a multitude of compounds with diverse chemical structures and concentrations; each of these compounds may have numerous targets of different affinity and specificity, any of which might impact food safety and bioactivity – positively or negatively. The contrast to pharmaceuticals in terms of complexity is especially notable. As if to prove the point on the matter, so far only two studies have been published (one of them from our group) in which the effect of a given food ingredient on the expression levels within the transcriptome, proteome and metabolome were simultaneously interrogated (1, 2).

Foodomics has an abundance of challenges, including: inadequate bioinformatic tools; a lack of comprehensive metabolite databases; poor understanding of many molecular processes taking place in cells, and the difficulty in combining massive amounts of data generated by transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic approaches (via systems biology). We are still very far from achieving the dream of a personalized diet; we’re only just fitting the first pieces of the giant jigsaw of “food and health”. It will take many years of research before we gain the necessary knowledge of this complex, fundamental topic.

Despite these limitations, the global outlook for foodomics is promising. Since the first definition of foodomics in a science citation index (SCI) - listed journal in 2009 (3), the use of omic approaches in food science and nutrition has evolved and grown spectacularly. The term is a popular catch-all for omics approaches to investigate food safety, quality, traceability or bioactivity. There are already several foodomics labs around the world (my own and The Netherland’s RIKILT in Wageningen being examples); international conferences on foodomics have popped up in Italy, France and India (4, 5, 6); Facebook and Wikipedia both cover the topic (7, 8), and there are even videos on YouTube (9).

When we coined the term “Foodomics” it signified that food analysis was entering a new era. It also highlighted the opportunities for omics tools to solve both traditional and new problems in food science. Indeed, as I state in the preface of the first book devoted to this discipline: “Foodomics is opening a new and unexpected land still wild, still unexplored to a new generation of researchers…” (10).