An international team of scientists has reported on a new method to identify the large number of food-derived molecules that were not previously found but appear in our blood and feces.
The method called “untargeted metabolomics” was described in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology. The technique combined products of metabolism in one specimen with large sample databases where chemical inventories were available, providing an unprecedented catalog of the signatures of molecules created by food consumption.
According to scientists at the University of California, San Diego, in the United States, who led the study, the new approach could significantly expand the understanding of chemical sources in many types of human, animal and plant samples.
“Undirected mass spectrometry is a very sensitive technique that allows detection of hundreds to thousands of molecules that can now be used to profile the diet of individuals,” said lead author Pieter Dorrestein, director of the Collaborative Center for Spectrometry in Mass from the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, in a statement.
What am I eating?
The expert says that expanding the ability to understand how what we eat translates into products and by-products of metabolism has direct implications for human health.
“We can now use this approach to empirically gain information about diet and understand relationships with clinical outcomes. It is possible to link molecules in the diet to health outcomes, not one at a time, but all at once, which was not possible before,” he says.
Metabolomics involves the comprehensive measurement of all metabolites in a biological sample. Metabolites are the substances, usually small molecules, made or used when an organism breaks down food, drugs, chemicals or its own tissues – they are products of metabolism.
The study also used a related technique, metagenomics, to measure genetic material in biological samples and characterize the microbes present.
Current studies identify only 10% of the molecular features in samples, leaving 90% of the material unknown. The new approach uses reference data-driven analysis to combine information obtained by mass spectrometry, which allows it to detect and identify specific molecules.
In the study, researchers investigated thousands of foods from the Global FoodOmics initiative. Scientists have increased data production by more than 5 years compared to conventional techniques. The new method allowed the technique to be used to determine a person’s diet based on a blood or stool sample.
advances
According to the experts, the analysis allowed the observation of dietary patterns (vegan or omnivorous, for example) and the consumption of specific foods and, more generally, the comparison of the information with any existing reference database.
“This advance is crucial because traditional methods for measuring diet, such as food diaries or food frequency questionnaires, are difficult to fill out and very difficult to do accurately,” said co-author Rob Knight, director of the Microbiome Innovation Center at University of California at San Diego.
“The potential of reading a sample’s diet directly has huge implications for research in populations such as people with Alzheimer’s disease, who may not be able to remember or explain what they ate. And in wildlife conservation applications.”
For scientists, the methodology represents advances in the study of how diet can influence the development of diseases.
“This really shows how important it will be to get food samples and clinical samples from people all over the world to understand how our molecules and microbes work together to improve or degrade our health based on what we eat,” Knight said.
Source: CNN Brasil
