Recent Foodomic Developments to Investigate the Bioactivity of Dietary Ingredients

Safety, quality and bioactivity of foods and food ingredients can be investigated today at molecular level thanks to Foodomics [1-4], via the application and integration of advanced omics platforms, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and/or metabolomics. In this work, we will present the fundamentals of Foodomics, discussing the role of this new discipline to solve some current and future challenges in food science and nutrition, and showing several Foodomics applications carried out in our laboratory related to food quality and food bioactivity. Namely, these Foodomics works were done: i) to evaluate the quality of (transgenic vs. non-transgenic) foods, ii) to investigate the possibilities of Foodomics in Alzheimer’s disease studies and, iii) to determine the anti-proliferative effect of food ingredients against different human cancer cell lines. Whole-transcriptome microarray, proteomics and MS-based non-targeted whole-metabolome approaches were employed to carry out the mentioned studies. These Foodomics strategies enabled: i) the identification of metabolite differences that could be used as food quality markers, ii)  the identification of biomarkers for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease which should allow to investigate the effect of diet on this illness, and iii) the identification of several differentially expressed genes alone and/or linked to changed metabolic pathways that were modulated by food ingredients in cancer cells, providing new evidences at molecular level on the antiproliferative effect of food compounds.