Special Issue: Plant Omics,Food Engineering,and New Frontiers in Nutrigenomics

OMICS December special issue presents plant omics and food engineering with an eye to emerging frontiers in nutrigenomics and precision nutrition.

Nutrition research has a storied past dating back to 1785 when the fundamental processes of metabolism and respiration were discovered (Carpenter, 2003). Roger J. Williams, a nutritional biochemist, suggested heredity as a basis of variability in biological responses to food and the environment in the mid-20th century (Williams, 1956). In 1971, Brewer coined the term ecogenetics, expanding the concept of gene–environment interactions and defining environment in the broadest sense, for example, drug, food, chemical, and other ecological exposures. Nutrigenomics, the study of genome-by-nutrition interactions, is best situated against this historical context as a subfield of ecogenetics. Nutrigenomics contributes to precision nutrition by unraveling the mechanisms of person-to-person and population differences in response to food exposures.

Seen in this light, multiomic variability in plants and engineering of food composition are the “input” functions leading to variability in nutritional outcomes. OMICS December special issue presents new findings on plant omics and food engineering that address these knowledge dimensions. The articles signal new frontiers in nutrigenomics and the potentials of systems science-driven food engineering for precision nutrition.

Plant omics is also relevant to identifying novel therapeutics against the current COVID-19 pandemic. Plants and herbal medicines have been used as remedies for human diseases since time immemorial but their molecular mechanisms of action are not adequately characterized or remain unknown. Plant omics offers an opportunity for rigorous systems science-driven evaluation of traditional medicines and natural products.

Finally, we currently live in an era facing ecological crises beyond COVID-19, such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and threats to agriculture. Plant omics and food engineering, therefore, offer crosscutting perspectives and value to sustainable agriculture and ecological sciences.

I trust you will enjoy reading the articles in the special issue that relate to, for example, biofortified foods, probiotics, precision herbal medicine in Africa, coconut possessing enhanced disease resistance, and the new field of placebogenomics so as to distinguish placebo versus efficacy signals in clinical trials of new natural products and drug candidates.

I welcome your future articles on plant omics and food engineering that inform the field of systems science and integrative biology.