Nutritional Metabolomics: the Search for Dietary Exposure Variables

In the post-genomic era, a major challenge for health research is to understand the complex interactions among genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors including dietary intake. Unfortunately, such initiatives are hampered by the lack of accurate dietary intake assessment methods for large studies. The newly emerging field of metabolomics offers unique possibilities to characterize individual food intake, dietary patterns and effects of dietary intervention in large studies. The investigators propose to develop a platform to detect broad metabolomic responses to food intake in controlled trials as well as to use targeted metabolomics approaches to characterize dietary intake in longitudinal studies. Our laboratory has a long history of developing methodology for assessing nutritional status and effects of diet on metabolism. Here, the investigators team up with the Sahlgrenska Academy Core Facility and the Swedish NMR Centre at the University of Gothenburg, that offer modern metabolomics equipment and competence in bioinformatics, and use this in the context of nutrition research. To their knowledge, the investigators are among the first groups in the country to develop skills in metabolomics to assess dietary intake and effects of nutrition on metabolism, and probably the first to use two complementary platforms with both mass-spectrometry and nuclear magnetic spectroscopy. Hence, our methodological results should be useful to nutritional scientists nationally as well as internationally.