FOODOMICS

The impressive analytical developments achieved at the end of the twentieth century have made possible the sequencing of nearly the whole human genome at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, opening the so-called postgenomic era. These
advances have made feasible analytical instruments and methodological developments that were unthinkable a few decades ago. These impressive developments have
traditionally found their first application in the biotechnological or biochemical field
many times linked to pharmaceutical, medical, or clinical needs. The huge amount
of money allocated to these fields of research is logically an additional push to be
considered when selecting the area in which a new analytical method can be probed,
a good way to compensate the efforts behind any innovative analytical development.
As a result, biotech, pharmaceutical, and clinical related industries have usually been
the first targets for analytical chemists and instrumentation companies. This has left
food analysis overshadowed and connected to the use of more traditional analytical
approaches. Nowadays, boundaries among the different research fields are becoming more and more diffuse giving rise to impressive possibilities in the emerging
interdisciplinary areas, for example, health and food. As a result, researchers in food
science and nutrition are being pushed to move from classical methodologies to more
advanced strategies usually borrowing methods well established in medical, pharmacological, and/or biotechnology research. This trend has generated the emergence of
new areas of research for which a new terminology is required. In this context, our
group defined a few years ago Foodomics, as a discipline that studies the food and
nutrition domains through the application of advanced omics technologies to improve
consumer’s well-being, health, and confidence. The main idea behind the use of this
new term has been not only to use it as a flag of the new times for food analysis but also
to highlight that the investigation into traditional and new problems in food analysis