Nutritional metabolomics: Progress in addressing complexity in diet and health

• Authors: Dean P Jones, Emory University; Youngja Park, Emory University; Thomas R Ziegler, Emory University
• Journal Title: Annual Review of Nutrition
• Volume: Volume 32
• Publisher: Annual Reviews | 2012-08-21, Pages 183-202
• Type of Work: Article | Post-print: After Peer Review
• Publisher DOI: http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nutr-072610-145159
• Subjects: Health Sciences, General; Health Sciences, Nutrition; Biology, Bioinformatics
• Keywords: Systems biology; microbiome; prevention; mass spectrometry; personalized medicine; exposome

Abstract

Nutritional metabolomics is rapidly maturing to use small molecule chemical profiling to support integration of diet and nutrition in complex biosystems research. These developments are critical to facilitate transition of nutritional sciences from population-based to individual-based criteria for nutritional research, assessment and management. This review addresses progress in making these approaches manageable for nutrition research. Important concept developments concerning the exposome, predictive health and complex pathobiology, serve to emphasize the central role of diet and nutrition in integrated biosystems models of health and disease. Improved analytic tools and databases for targeted and non-targeted metabolic profiling, along with bioinformatics, pathway mapping and computational modeling, are now used for nutrition research on diet, metabolism, microbiome and health associations. These new developments enable metabolome-wide association studies (MWAS) and provide a foundation for nutritional metabolomics, along with genomics, epigenomics and health phenotyping, to support integrated models required for personalized diet and nutrition forecasting.