Horizon Scanning: How Will Metabolomics Applications Transform Food Science, Bioengineering, and Medical Innovation in the Current Era of Foodomics?

Nutritional Metabolomics in Diet-Breast Cancer Relations: Current Research, Challenges, and Future Directions-A Review

Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in women worldwide, and its incidence is increasing. Diet has been identified as a modifiable risk factor for breast cancer, but the complex interplay between diet, metabolism, and cancer development is not fully understood. Nutritional metabolomics is a rapidly evolving field that can provide insights into the metabolic changes associated with dietary factors and their impact on breast cancer risk. The review's objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on the application of nutritional metabolomics in understanding the relationship between diet and breast cancer. The search strategy involved querying several electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The search terms included combinations of relevant keywords such as "nutritional metabolomics", "diet", "breast cancer", "metabolites", and "biomarkers". In this review, both in vivo and in vitro studies were included, and we summarize the current state of knowledge on the role of nutritional metabolomics in understanding the diet-breast cancer relationship, including identifying specific metabolites and metabolic pathways associated with breast cancer risk. We also discuss the challenges associated with nutritional metabolomics research, including standardization of analytical methods, interpretation of complex data, and integration of multiple-omics approaches. Finally, we highlight future directions for nutritional metabolomics research in studying diet-breast cancer relations, including investigating the role of gut microbiota and integrating multiple-omics approaches. The application of nutritional metabolomics in the study of diet-breast cancer relations, including 2-amino-4-cyano butanoic acid, piperine, caprate, rosten-3β,17β-diol-monosulfate, and γ-carboxyethyl hydrochroman, among others, holds great promise for advancing our understanding of the role of diet in breast cancer development and identifying personalized dietary recommendations for breast cancer prevention, control, and treatment.

Applications of Metabolomics to Precision Nutrition

BACKGROUND

For thousands of years, disabilities due to nutrient deficiencies have plagued humanity. Rickets, scurvy, anemia, stunted growth, blindness, and mental handicaps due to nutrient deficiencies affected up to 1/10 of the world's population prior to 1900. The discovery of essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, in the early 1900s, led to a fundamental change in our understanding of food and a revolution in human health. Widespread vitamin and mineral supplementation, the development of recommended dietary allowances, and the implementation of food labeling and testing along with significant improvements in food production and food quality have meant that nutrient-related disorders have almost vanished in the developed world. The success of nutritional science in preventing disease at a population-wide level is one of the great scientific triumphs of the 20th century. The challenge for nutritional science in the 21st century is to understand how to use nutrients and other food constituents to enhance human health or prevent disease at a more personal level. This is the primary goal of precision nutrition.

SUMMARY

Precision nutrition is an emerging branch of nutrition science that aims to use modern omics technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to assess an individual's response to specific foods or dietary patterns and thereby determine the most effective diet or lifestyle interventions to prevent or treat specific diseases in that individual. Metabolomics is vital to nearly every aspect of precision nutrition. It can be used to comprehensively characterize the thousands of chemicals in foods, to identify food byproducts in human biofluids or tissues, to characterize nutrient deficiencies or excesses, to monitor biochemical responses to dietary interventions, to track long-term or short-term dietary habits, and to guide the development of nutritional therapies. In this review, we will describe how metabolomics has been used to advance the field of precision nutrition by providing some notable examples or use cases. First, we will describe how metabolomics helped launch the field of precision nutrition through the diagnosis and dietary therapy of individuals with inborn errors of metabolism. Next, we will describe how metabolomics is being used to comprehensively characterize the full chemical complexity of many key foods, and how this is revealing much more about nutrients than ever imagined. Third, we will describe how metabolomics is being used to identify food consumption biomarkers and how this opens the door to a more objective and quantitative assessments of an individual's diet and their response to certain foods. Finally, we will describe how metabolomics is being coupled with other omics technologies to develop custom diets and lifestyle interventions that are leading to positive health benefits. Key Message: Metabolomics is vital to the advancement of nutritional science and in making the dream of precision nutrition a reality.

What Differentiates Probiotic from Pathogenic Bacteria? The Genetic Mobility of Enterococcus faecium Offers New Molecular Insights

Enterococcus faecium is a lactic acid bacterium with applications in food engineering and nutrigenomics, including as starter cultures in fermented foods. To differentiate the E. faecium probiotic from pathogenic bacteria, physiological analyses are often used but they do not guarantee that a bacterial strain is not pathogenic. We report here new findings and an approach based on comparison of the genetic mobility of (1) probiotic, (2) pathogenic, and (3) nonpathogenic and non-probiotic strains, so as to differentiate probiotics, and inform their safe use. The region of the 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) genes of different E. faecium strains native to Pernambuco-Brazil was used with the GenBank query sequence. Complete genomes were selected and divided into three groups as noted above to identify the mobile genetic elements (MGEs) (transposase, integrase, conjugative transposon protein and phage) and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), and to undertake pan-genome analysis and multiple genome alignment. Differences in the number of MGEs were found in ARGs, in the presence and absence of the genes that differentiate E. faecium probiotics and pathogenic bacteria genetically. Our data suggest that genetic mobility appears to be informative in differentiating between probiotic and pathogenic strains. While the present findings are not necessarily applicable to all probiotics, they offer novel molecular insights to guide future research in nutrigenomics, clinical medicine, and food engineering on new ways to differentiate pathogenic from probiotic bacteria.

COVID-19 Digital Health Innovation Policy: A Portal to Alternative Futures in the Making

"The pandemic is a portal." In the words of the novelist scholar Arundhati Roy, the COVID-19 pandemic is not merely an epic calamity. It has opened up a new space, a portal, to rethink everything, for example, in how we live, work, produce scientific knowledge, provide health care, and relate to others, be they humans or nonhuman animals in planetary ecosystems. Meanwhile, as the intensity of the pandemic escalates, digital health tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT), biosensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) are being deployed to address the twin goals of social distancing and health care in a "no touch" emergency state. Permanent integration of digital technologies into every aspect of post-pandemic civic life-health care, disease tracking, education, work, and beyond-is considered by governments and technology actors around the world. Although digital transformation of health care and industry are in the works, we ought to ensure that digital transformation does not degenerate into "digitalism," which we define here as an unchecked and misguided belief on extreme digital connectivity without considering the attendant adverse repercussions on science, human rights, and everyday practices of democracy. Indeed, the current shrinking of the critically informed public policy space amid a devastating pandemic raises principled questions on the broader and long-term impacts that digital technologies will have on democratic governance of planetary health and society. To this end, a wide range of uncertainties-technical, biological, temporal, spatial, and political-is on the COVID-19 pandemic horizon. This calls for astute and anticipatory innovation policies to steer the health sciences and services toward democratic ends. In this article, we describe new and critically informed approaches to democratize COVID-19 digital health innovation policy, especially when the facts are uncertain, the stakes are high, and decisions are urgent, as they often are in the course of a pandemic. In addition, we introduce a potential remedy to democratize pandemic innovation policy, the concept of "epistemic competence," so as to check the frames and framings of the pandemic innovation policy juggernaut and the attendant power asymmetries. We suggest that if epistemic competence, and attention to not only scientific knowledge but also its framing are broadly appreciated, they can help reduce the disparity between the enormous technical progress and investments made in digital health versus our currently inadequate understanding of the societal dimensions of emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, and extreme digital connectivity on the planet.

Eurotium Cristatum Fermented Okara as a Potential Food Ingredient to Combat Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a chronic disease, and dietary modification is a crucial part of disease management. Okara is a sustainable source of fibre-rich food. Most of the valorization research on okara focused more on the physical attributes instead of the possible health attributes. The fermentation of okara using microbes originated from food source, such as tea, sake, sufu and yoghurt, were explored here. The aim of this study is to investigate fermented okara as a functional food ingredient to reduce blood glucose levels. Fermented and non-fermented okara extracts were analyzed using the metabolomic approach with UHPLC-QTof-MS^E. Statistical analysis demonstrated that the anthraquinones, emodin and physcion, served as potential markers and differentiated Eurotium cristatum fermented okara (ECO) over other choices of microbes. The in-vitro α-glucosidase activity assays and in-vivo mice studies showed that ECO can reduce postprandial blood glucose levels. A 20% ECO loading crispy snack prototype revealed a good nutrition composition and could serve as a fundamental formulation for future antidiabetes recipe development, strengthening the hypothesis that ECO can be used as a novel food ingredient for diabetic management.

Genome-Scale Metabolic Model of a Microbial Cell Factory (Brevibacillus thermoruber 423) with Multi-Industry Potentials for Exopolysaccharide Production

Brevibacillus thermoruber 423 is a thermophilic bacterium capable of producing high levels of exopolysaccharide (EPS) that has broad applications in nutrition, feed, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, not to mention in health and bionanotechnology sectors. EPS is a natural, nontoxic, and biodegradable polymer of sugar residues and plays pivotal roles in cell-to-cell interactions, adhesion, biofilm formation, and protection of cell against environmental extremes. This bacterium is a thermophilic EPS producer while exceeding other thermophilic producers by virtue of high level of polymer synthesis. Recently, B. thermoruber 423 was noted for relevance to multiple industry sectors because of its capacity to use xylose, and produce EPS, isoprenoids, ethanol/butanol, lipases, proteases, cellulase, and glucoamylase enzymes as well as its resistance to arsenic. A key step in understanding EPS production with a systems-based approach is the knowledge of microbial genome sequence. To speed biotechnology and industrial applications, this study reports on a genome-scale metabolic model (GSMM) of B. thermoruber 423, constructed using the recently available high-quality genome sequence that we have subsequently validated using physiological data on batch growth and EPS production on seven different carbon sources. The model developed contains 1454 reactions (of which 1127 are assigned an enzyme commission number) and 1410 metabolites from 925 genes. This GSMM offers the promise to enable and accelerate further systems biology and industrial scale studies, not to mention the ability to calculate metabolic flux distribution in large networks and multiomic data integration.