Systems biology and Nutrition

Systems biology has established itself as a paradigm which has been adopted in order to integrate a wealth of omics data which has been generated in the last few decades. Nutrition research has gradually embraced the systems biology approach, and this holistic way of investigating biological systems is beginning to pay dividends for our understanding of diet and its relationship with health. This chapter presents an overview of the key strands of systems biology; these include, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and computational modelling. I discuss how these techniques are being used to gain new insights into nutrition research. Moreover, I reveal how computational modelling is being used to unravel how ageing effects cholesterol and folate metabolism. The chapter concludes by providing an insight into how systems biology will be applied to nutrition research in the future