ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the application of genomics and bioinformatics as it applies to nutrition. It demonstrates the use of bioinformatics principles and application as applied to nutritional genomics. Bioinformatics skills can be mastered at several levels. Bioinformatics tools will continue to be indispensable to mining the realm of genomic and proteomic data to come. Nutrigenomics seeks to examine the influence of dietary signals as it relates to cellular homeostasis and the effects of nutrition on health and disease. As an emerging field, genomics incorporates aspects of structural, comparative, and functional biology. Numerous studies in nutritional genomics are addressing questions of the influence of dietary lipids on gene regulation and subsequent changes in metabolism with a goal of establishing how diets can be modified to improve health. Integrative genomic approaches are being conducted that coordinate dietary changes at gene, protein, and metabolite levels of organization.
