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Individual metabolism should guide agriculture toward foods for improved health and nutrition^1,2,3

¹ From the Departments of Food Science and Technology and of Entomology and the Cancer Research Center, University of California, Davis; Lipomics Technologies, Inc, West Sacramento, CA; and the Nestle Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Genomics and bioinformatics have the vast potential to identify genes that cause disease by investigating whole-genome databases. Comparison of an individual's geno-type with a genomic database will allow the prescription of drugs to be tailored to an individual's genotype. This same bioinfor-matic approach, applied to the study of human metabolites, has the potential to identify and validate targets to improve person-alized nutritional health and thus serve to define the added value for the next generation of foods and crops. Advances in high-throughput analytic chemistry and computing technologies make the creation of a vast database of metabolites possible for several subsets of metabolites, including lipids and organic acids. In cre-ating integrative databases of metabolites for bioinformatic investigation, the current concept of measuring single biomark-ers must be expanded to 3 dimensions to 1) include a highly comprehensive set of metabolite measurements (a profile) by multiparallel analyses, 2) measure the metabolic profile of indi-viduals over time rather than simply in the fasted state, and 3) integrate these metabolic profiles with genomic, expression, and proteomic databases. Application of the knowledge of indi-vidual metabolism will revolutionize the ability of nutrition to deliver health benefits through food in the same way that knowl-edge of genomics will revolutionize individual treatment of dis-ease with pharmaceuticals.

Key Words: Metabolomics • lipids • metabolites • genomics • bioinformatics • agriculture • medicine • nutrition

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