Databases and the food metabolome

Moderator:      Augustin SCALBERT

Contributors:   David WISHART, Claudine MANACH, Oliver FIEHN

Overview of session

The area of quantification of food intake via plasma and urine metabolomics has been discussed at various occasions and is ready for harmonization.

What do we expect from databases?

-          To provide detailed food composition data and calculate intake of food components from dietary records

-          To provide detailed information on metabolites of food components and their range of concentration in urine and plasma

-          To facilitate annotation of the food metabolome in metabolic fingerprints

-          To predict food component metabolites expected in urine or plasma metabolome after consumption of a specific food or diet

For which purposes?

-          To identify the best biomarker to assess food intake and exposure to food bioactives in clinical and population studies

-          To better characterize human exposure to a large range of food bioactives

-          To characterize the inter-individual variability in exposure to the nutrients and bioactives metabolites

-          To understand relationships between the food metabolome (and exposure to food bioactives) and the genome in humans

-          To understand relationships between the food metabolome (and exposure to food bioactives) and health outcomes

What is already available?

-          About food chemicals

-          About food composition

-          About metabolism of food components and metabolite concentrations in humans

-          About spectral data on food chemicals and their metabolites

What is missing?

-          Qualitative and quantitative information on food composition beyond common macro- and micronutrients

-          Qualitative and quantitative information of the food metabolome in human biofluids

-          Standardized formats to collect, evaluate and store data of different nature and origin

-          Common repository allowing easy queries

Short presentations (1^st of July)

15:00               Databases and the food metabolome: Present resources and goals for

future developments

Augustin Scalbert

15:15               FooDB and perspectives for the construction of an international

                        Consortium

David Wishart

15:30               Title

Oliver Fiehn

Discussion

-          On-going projects

-          Sharing knowledge and experimental data

-          Linking human and food (plant) metabolomics

-          Public vs. proprietary data

-          New tools needed (text mining, analytical methods…)

-          Priorities for collaborative projects

-          Associating food and nutrition journals to the effort

-          Which role for the NuGO association?

Suggested reading

1.      Wishart, D. S., Knox, C., Guo, A. C., Eisner, R., Young, N., Gautam, B., Hau, D. D., Psychogios, N., Dong, E., Bouatra, S., Mandal, R., Sinelnikov, I., Xia, J. G., Jia, L., Cruz, J. A., Lim, E., Sobsey, C. A., Shrivastava, S., Huang, P., Liu, P., Fang, L., Peng, J., Fradette, R., Cheng, D., Tzur, D., Clements, M., Lewis, A., De Souza, A., Zuniga, A., Dawe, M., Xiong, Y. P., Clive, D., Greiner, R., Nazyrova, A., Shaykhutdinov, R., Li, L., Vogel, H. J. & Forsythe, I. (2009) HMDB: a knowledgebase for the human metabolome. Nucleic Acids Research 37: D603-D610.

2.      Kind, T., Scholz, M. & Fiehn, O. (2009) How Large Is the Metabolome? A Critical Analysis of Data Exchange Practices in Chemistry. Plos One 4.

3.      Neveu, V., Perez-Jimenez, J., Vos, F., Crespy, V., du Chaffaut, L., Mennen, L., Knox, C., Eisner, R., Cruz, J., Wishart, D. & Scalbert, A. (2010) Phenol-Explorer: an online comprehensive database on polyphenol contents in foods. Database: doi: 10.1093/database/bap1024.