Metabolomics and Individual Metabolic Assessment: The Next Great Challenge for Nutrition

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Abstract
The human genome has arrived. The technologies of global transcriptional analysis are building the greatest knowledge base in the history of biological science and the world is waiting impatiently for the benefits that this knowledge will provide. Discouragingly for nutrition, in the current public health environment, knowledge from genomics alone will not provide dramatic benefits to quality of life for most people immediately. The genome and its application through functional genomics are building knowledge most rapidly to identify the causes and complications of diseases and resolve them through therapeutic intervention. Nutrition, however, has a broader and more comprehensive mandate than ameliorating disease. Nutrition now arrives at the genomic era with the goal to go beyond curing disease in afflicted individuals, to preventing disease and improving health of entire populations. Nevertheless, nutrition can not succeed in delivering on this bold promise with genomics (the study of entire genomes) as the only tool in its kit. Individuals do not have the luxury of altering their genome during their lifetime. Although genomics will be the essential foundation of knowledge, it is the expression of the genome both as the proteome (the study of entire protein complements of cells tissues or fluid compartments), and more directly as the metabolome (the study of entire metabolite complements in cells, tissues or fluids) (1–3) that will serve as the information base for modern nutrition. The comprehensive study of metabolites will provide nutrition with the tools to enter the 'omic revolution. In fact, metabolomics should be led by the field of nutrition. For this reason, The Journal of Nutrition is soliciting articles advancing metabolomics. The Journal of Nutrition will view metabolomic articles as those articles reporting on metabolites as entire metabolomes or as subsets whose analysis provides enabling technologies, information technologies (bioinformatics) or interpreted data sets from studies designed to contribute to the knowledge of entire metabolomes.