Food Structure for Nutrition - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 11

This is not, however, the structure of milk fat globules. Milk fat globules are
simple, lipoprotein-like particles, as they are produced in the epithelial cell; but
they do not acquire an apoprotein on their surface; and further, on exiting from
the cell, each globule is enrobed with an intact coating of plasma membrane
bilayer. 46 It is still perplexing to scientists as to why precisely this unusual
course to milk fat structure evolved, but one thing has been determined. The
hydrolysis rate of the milk fat globule is dramatically slowed by the presence of
this additional plasma membrane bilayer. 47

1.7 Food Structure and Nutrition - The Future
As a speciality within food science, the structure-function analysis of genetically
defined biopolymers and their complexes has enormous potential in the coming
decades. Previously, each field within the life sciences made progress within the
narrow constraints of its particular discipline. Whereas there was sharing of the
final outcomes (i.e., confirmed or refuted hypotheses), the detailed information
that was responsible ultimately for building the knowledge that they generated
was only usable within each field. This perspective is now changing dramatically.
Many fields of scientific inquiry are beginning to make progress in areas that
produce information that, in its breadth, can be leveraged for the structure-
function analysis of food materials. Given these technological innovations, an
overview of what goals may be achievable is presented in Table 2.
To date, the most notable progress in structure-function analysis has been
made with proteins. In the 1970s, the Brookhaven National Laboratory estab-
lished the Protein Data Bank (PDB) as a repository for three-dimensional
structural data of biological macromolecules. 48 A key aspect of this endeavour

Table 2 From food structure to nutrition function: a vision for future decades

Goal Key requirements Fields to follow

Establish function of known
structure set

1. Standardization (structure
format, experimental
conditions, measurable end
points)

Biochemistry,
pharmacology

2. Database development
(repository)

Establish function of
synthetic structure libraries

1. Combinatorial synthesis of
structures

Chemical
genomics

2. Development of assays
amenable to high-throughput
screening

Establish individual
response to structure

1. High-throughput screening
for relevant polymorphisms

Pharmaco-
genomics

2. Optimization of food
structure for specific profiles