|Talks|

Foodome Project: Tackling the Complexity of Food Systems

Visiting speaker
Past Talk
Giulia Menichetti
Associate Research Scientist, CCNR
Apr 28, 2022
11:00 am
Apr 28, 2022
11:00 am
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Naturally occurring compounds and additives lack extensive records describing their presence in food, their quantified amounts, and their binding interactions with known protein targets. As a result, the chemical complexity of our food is still largely unmapped. This sparse characterization limits our chances to develop a mechanistic understanding of how food chemicals impact our health. In recent years, the Foodome project has tackled several aspects of this challenging universe, leveraging the expertise of a diverse group of scientific communities, from computer science to epidemiology. In this talk, I will cover some of the major scientific contributions of the Foodome project. Specifically, I will start with our efforts to create the most extensive curated library of food chemicals before exploring how this new body of knowledge prompted us to develop quantitative tools predicting protein-ligand binding and quantifying the natural scale of nutrient concentrations in food. Additionally, the nutrient patterns we observed in the food composition data have allowed us to define a metric of food processing, which we used to characterize the quality of the food supply, and to suggest public health intervention strategies with minimal impact on individuals’ dietary patterns.

About the speaker
Dr. Menichetti is a Senior Research Scientist at the Network Science Institute (Northeastern University), and an Associate Researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School). She is a statistical/computational physicist by training, and during her Ph.D. she specialized in Network Science. She currently leads the Foodome project, which aims to track the full chemical complexity of the food we consume and develop quantitative tools to unveil, at the mechanistic level, the impact of these chemicals on our health.
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Apr 28, 2022