Foodomics

What is metabolomics for the agri-food industry?

The term foodomics refers to the discipline that explores the fields of diet and nutrition through the application and integration of the omics methodologies, which consist of the use of techniques that allow the acquisition of massive data related to biomolecules, as well as their processing using bioinformatics tools. The main omics are genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. While genomics and transcriptomics are mainly related to the response of the human body to dietary habits, proteomics and metabolomics enable to analyze food properties that may be quality and security indicators.

Among the several techniques used in metabolomics, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) stands out, featuring prominently as a cutting-edge technology, due to its high precision and reproducibility, as for the possibility of generating predictive models using NMR data.