Nutriproteomics - Linking Proteomics Variation with Personalized Nutrition

Nutrition research has traditionally focused on providing adequate amounts of nutrients to nourish populations and prevent nutrient deficiencies. Modern nutrition science explores health-related aspects of bioactive components in foodstuffs at a subgroup rather than population level. Today's nutrition research focuses on promoting health, preventing or delaying the onset of disease, optimizing performance and assessing risk in individuals or subpopulations. Personalized nutrition means adapting food to individual needs, depending on host biological variation as well as life stage, style and situation. Nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics comprise the science to understand human genomic/genetic variability in preferences, requirements, and responses to diet and may become the future tools for personalized nutrition, health maintenance and disease prevention. The novel field of nutriproteomics builds upon and complements the field of nutrigenomics/ nutrigenetics. Nutriproteomics has great potential as a tool for personalized nutrition. Specifically, nutriproteomics delivers two essential outputs for molecular nutrition research and applications in personalized nutrition: (1) the characterization and quantification of food-derived bioactive peptides and proteins and (2) the elucidation of biomarkers for mechanism- of-action, efficacy and side effects of nutritional interventions. This article introduces the new field of nutriproteomics in the context of nutrition and health research and discusses protein- and peptide-derived bioactives and biomarkers, highlights human proteome variability and how best to translate this field into personalized nutrition. The paper concludes with a status quo and outlook on nutriproteomics studies and technologies.