From molecular nutrition to nutritional systems biology.
In: Epigenetics and human health: linking hereditary, environmental and nutritional aspects. 2009, Publ. E. A. Miller ... [et al.], Wiley-VCH, London. 2009, 127-140.
The human genome sequencing project headed by the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) which started in the early 1990s, has triggered dramatic technological and conceptual developments in the life sciences. In particular, HUGO led to the rise of the "-omic" technologies that, together with bioinformatics, now allow biological systems to be investigated holistically. Medical and pharmaceutical sciences have long realized that, in most cases, simple molecular mechanisms cannot account for deregulation in human metabolism. Consequently, these sciences now clearly make use of the tools derived from HUGO to take a systemic (global) approach to multifactorial diseases. Nutrition research is now leaming from medical and pharmaceutical research by replacing the pharmacogenomics concept "patient/drug/treatment/omics" by the nutrigenomic concept "healthy consumer / food/prevention/omics". The technologies used in nutrigenomics, along the chain of molecular information leading from DNA to metabolites in the cell (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics), as well as in nutrigenetics and nutri-epigenetics are described. Examples of these research strategies are also presented.
