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Nutritional Metabolomics
Metabolomics is the newly emerging science and technology that studies all low molecular weight compounds (metabolites) involved in primary and intermediary metabolism in a living system. Although it already has wide applications, we consider metabolomics to be especially adapted to the relationship between nutrition and health, for a number of reasons.
- Firstly, nutrition is about maintaining cellular and organism homeostasis, with metabolites playing a key role.
- Secondly, nutrition focuses on the prevention of a number of metabolic diseases.
- Thirdly, the diet contains thousands of small molecules, both nutrients and non-nutrients.
The need for further improvement of science and technology in nutritional metabolomics has lead NuGO to form a task force with four working groups, in four areas which we think are essential. These working groups will be intitially formed under the “umbrella” of NuGO, for the sake of speedy establishment and communication support. The goal, however, is to shape this effort as a truly global initiative. These groups are:
- 1 - Defining the Nutritional Metabolome.
- 2 - Development of nutritional metabolome Analytical Tools.
- 3 - Defining the Nutrition-Metabolome Interaction.
- 4 - Establishing Nutritional Metabolomics Database.
The major project at this moment is to construct the biology knowlewdge base for nutritonal metabolomics. In collaboration with the Human Metabolome Data Base project, a wikicard is constructed for 1700 nutritionally relevant metabolites. You are invited to join this effort.
The explanation for editors page helps the first set of editors to shape the wikipages.
Links to external websites with useful metabolomics information.
At present, this initiative is password protected but it is intended that it will become open access as soon as possible.