Global Foodomics strategy to investigate the health benefits of dietary constituents.

A global methodology, called Foodomics, which allows carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of the health benefits of food ingredients is presented in this work. The new methodology is based on the combination of several analytical platforms and data processing for Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics studies, allowing the determination of changes induced by food ingredients at molecular level. Both, the whole methodological development and its potential are presented through the investigation of a case study following a hypothesis-free strategy. Namely, the chemopreventive effect of polyphenols from rosemary was examined on the total gene, protein and metabolite expression in human HT29 colon cancer cells. Conclusions on the bioactivity of polyphenols against colon cancer cells based on the results from each single platform (Transcriptomics, Proteomics or Metabolomics) are compared with the conclusions based on the integration of the whole results from the three platforms, corroborating the interest of using a global integrative strategy as Foodomics. To our knowledge, although many papers and reviews have been published on this topic, this is the first time that Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics platforms are put together to study the health benefits from dietary ingredients against colon cancer cells at gene, protein and metabolite level. Advantages, drawbacks and current challenges of this global analytical strategy are discussed in this work. The results from our study provide new insights on the biological mechanisms involved in the cancer risk reduction properties of dietary constituents.