ABSTRACT
In the past decade, nutrigenomics has taken the eld of nutritional science by storm. Nutrigenomics can be dened as “the application of high-throughput genomic tools in nutrition research” (Muller and Kersten 2003, p. 315). Through the advent of novel technologies combined with an insatiable quest for scientic progress, important nutrition-related research questions that were once considered to be beyond our technological capacity have become amenable to experimental investigation. These technologies, best represented by transcriptomics but also including proteomics, metabolomics, and high-throughput genotyping, have created a wealth of new information, a major portion of which has yet to be fully understood. Nevertheless, major advancements have been made in our knowledge of the pleiotropic effects of dietary nutrients and the underlying mechanisms. One area that has especially benetted from the power of nutrigenomics is fatty acid sensing. Fatty acid sensing can be interpreted as the property of fatty acids to inuence biological processes by serving as signaling molecules. This chapter will provide an overview of the mechanisms of fatty acid sensing, focusing on diverse mechanisms of gene regulation by dietary fatty acids.
