From NuGOwiki

So far, nutritional metabolomics has been based mainly on pharmacology, toxicology and clinical chemistry and has largely been driven by metabolomics with the use of both assigned and unassigned peaks. An inventory is needed of nutrition-and-health relevant compounds in human biofluids, as targets forboth existing and new analytical and interpretation tools. A number of tasks are scheduled:

• Define the Nutritional Metabolomics Database

Some 1700 metabolites have been captured by the HMDB. These are now biologically annotated in NuGOwiki. Part of this process will be the "tagging" of these metabolites towards specific nutrition-related phenotypes, disorders and states. Thus, (sub)classes of metabolites will derive and will form the basis of targeted metabolomes.

• Define biological classes (amino acids, vitamins, anti-oxidants, etc) in these metabolomes.
• Define “Disease Specific Metabolomes".
• Obtain relevant quantitative and qualitative information (normal-range values, references, organ concentration, colloidal state, etc) about the metabolomes.
• Link with evaluation tools and metabolic pathway databases such as PubChem.
• Identify/prioritize metabolites of high / low importance.
• Identify metabolites with known or presumed time-dependent variations in concentration (circadian, post-prandial).
• A parallel task will define a sub-metabolome which will cover food-based non-nutrient phytochemicals which have known biological activities such as iso-flavones, flavonoids, carotenoids etc. This will define the criteria necessary for identifying the various phytochemicals and their metabolites and will lead to the construction of a database complimentary to the nutritional metabolome database.

This activity is led by Ben van Ommen and Bruce German

The number of small molecules in (human) tissues and biofluids is estimated to be over 20.000. The nutritional metabolome, however, will be a subset relevant metabolites.