Food Structure for Nutrition - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 12

was the use of a standard format, the PDB format, to represent structural data
derived from X-ray diffraction and NMR studies. As of 13 June 2006, there
were 37,136 protein and nucleic acid structures in the PDB database of the
Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB). Some more
recently established databases, such as the Structure Function Linkage
Database (SFLD), are integrating structural data with functional information. 49
The information in this database can be used for rule-based prediction of
functional capabilities of new structures with unknown functions so long as the
new structure is a member of a protein 'superfamily' in the database. The goal of
food scientists must increasingly be to extend such annotations to include the
structures and functions of proteins in food, and the diverse consequences of
such structures when consumed for the relationship between diet and health.
While a database like the SFLD has had to be painstakingly assembled from
the primary literature, the assembly of a food materials database could be
accelerated if food scientists were to standardize experimental conditions and
measurable end points at the outset. The integrity of inter-experimental analysis
would also be improved. To some scientists, the need for a database may not
seem immediately obvious. After all, new knowledge on the effect of a particular
lipid structure on the glycemic index of a food bolus, for example, would be
interesting in itself. But in the modern age of informatics, the data can be
recycled from past experiments to generate and/or test hypotheses that could not
have been conceived at the time of data collection. Furthermore, there remains
the tantalizing proposal that the analysis of well-characterized known structures
might help to predict the actions of unknown/unsynthesized structures.
Because it is unlikely that the predictive power of a few known structures will
be sufficient to estimate the action of the infinite number of possible structures,
food scientists may benefit from advances in chemical genomics. The objective
of chemical genomics is to find those small molecules that interact with the
genome. These molecules can then be used therapeutically as drugs or scien-
tifically in experiments to better understand specific biological pathways. 50 The
relevance to the science of food structure is that technologies for the combi-
natorial organic synthesis of small molecules may provide insight into methods
for the combinatorial synthesis of food structures. Also, the application of
creative labelling techniques, such as molecular tags, 51,52 could prove to be as
useful in refining food biopolymer structures as they have proven to be for their
biological counterparts.
To establish the functions of food structures in a fast and efficient manner,
food scientists need to develop assembly systems and assays that are amenable
to 'high-throughput' screening. At the cellular level, automated techniques have
been developed for everything from microarrays to cell imaging. At the level of
the organism, the means to measure metabolites in a high-throughput manner
is already available. 53 Concentrations of various metabolites and fluxes be-
tween different body pools can be measured simultaneously. Elucidating the
effect of food structures on the metabolome should lead to food products that
have an influence on chronic diseases, and thus have a widespread impact on
human health.