National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Public Health Sciences Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA.
Adv Nutr. 2020 Mar 1;11(2):200-215. doi: 10.1093/advances/nmz075.
While conventional nutrition research has yielded biomarkers such as doubly labeled water for energy metabolism and 24-h urinary nitrogen for protein intake, a critical need exists for additional, equally robust biomarkers that allow for objective assessment of specific food intake and dietary exposure. Recent advances in high-throughput MS combined with improved metabolomics techniques and bioinformatic tools provide new opportunities for dietary biomarker development. In September 2018, the NIH organized a 2-d workshop to engage nutrition and omics researchers and explore the potential of multiomics approaches in nutritional biomarker research. The current Perspective summarizes key gaps and challenges identified, as well as the recommendations from the workshop that could serve as a guide for scientists interested in dietary biomarkers research. Topics addressed included study designs for biomarker development, analytical and bioinformatic considerations, and integration of dietary biomarkers with other omics techniques. Several clear needs were identified, including larger controlled feeding studies, testing a variety of foods and dietary patterns across diverse populations, improved reporting standards to support study replication, more chemical standards covering a broader range of food constituents and human metabolites, standardized approaches for biomarker validation, comprehensive and accessible food composition databases, a common ontology for dietary biomarker literature, and methodologic work on statistical procedures for intake biomarker discovery. Multidisciplinary research teams with appropriate expertise are critical to moving forward the field of dietary biomarkers and producing robust, reproducible biomarkers that can be used in public health and clinical research.
虽然传统的营养研究已经产生了一些生物标志物，如双标记水用于能量代谢和 24 小时尿氮用于蛋白质摄入，但仍然迫切需要其他同样强大的生物标志物，以便能够客观评估特定的食物摄入和饮食暴露。高通量 MS 的最新进展结合改进的代谢组学技术和生物信息学工具为膳食生物标志物的开发提供了新的机会。2018 年 9 月，NIH 组织了为期两天的研讨会，让营养和组学研究人员参与进来，探讨多组学方法在营养生物标志物研究中的潜力。本观点总结了确定的关键差距和挑战，以及研讨会提出的建议，这些建议可以作为对膳食生物标志物研究感兴趣的科学家的指南。讨论的主题包括生物标志物开发的研究设计、分析和生物信息学考虑因素，以及将膳食生物标志物与其他组学技术相结合。确定了几个明确的需求，包括更大规模的对照喂养研究，在不同人群中测试各种食物和饮食模式，改进报告标准以支持研究复制，涵盖更广泛食物成分和人体代谢物的更多化学标准，用于验证生物标志物的标准化方法，全面且易于获取的食物成分数据库，饮食生物标志物文献的通用本体，以及用于摄入量生物标志物发现的统计程序的方法学工作。具有适当专业知识的多学科研究团队对于推进膳食生物标志物领域和产生可用于公共卫生和临床研究的强大、可重复的生物标志物至关重要。
