A systems biology approach to nutritional immunology – Focus on innate immunity

Integrating nutrition and immunology: A new frontier

“…With the advent of nutritional genomics (Afacan et al, 2012;Becker et al, 2010;Fellous and Lazzaro, 2010;Grayson, 2010), opportunities exist now to explore the interaction between nutrients and gene expression and their products to determine the mechanism behind disease development. This will provide significant insights into nutritional regulation of the innate immune system, the gut microbiota and pathogenesis.…”

Consensus statement understanding health and malnutrition through a systems approach: the ENOUGH program for early life

“…We now understand that pathways interact with regulatory elements, with one another, and with systems critical to the endocrine, circulatory, digestive, nervous, and immune function (Afacan et al 2012;MacLellan et al 2012;Slikker et al 2007;van Ommen et al 2008a, b;Zhao et al 2012). As an example, a map of the central immunity pathway linking the toll-like receptor 4 to the transcription factor NFjB (a master regulator responsive to nutrients) contains only 20 core components, but adding just the main interacting elements of these 20 core proteins expands the network to more than 800 proteins (Gardy et al 2009).…”

“…Systems thinking is starting to influence nutritional (Morine et al 2010(Morine et al , 2011(Morine et al , 2012 and immunological (Afacan et al 2012) research although significant challenges remain in adapting and applying these advances to human studies (Norheim et al 2012). Capturing a wider range of quantitative environmental and physiological measures like sleep, physical activity, psychology, healthcare disparities, and differences in social status (Kaput et al 2005) (Fig.…”

“…For example, the effects of malaria (Afacan et al 2012), assessment of and need for interacting nutrients (Zimmermann and Kohrle 2002), presence of environmental contaminants (e.g., lead) , differences in food matrix , microbiotic diversity (Gordon et al 2012), culture, and other factors may alter nutrient bioavailability and biological functions Genetic, epigenetic, microbiome, diet, and environmental and cultural diversity have not been sufficiently integrated in nutrition research from different studies for exploratory, diagnostic, and predictive computational modeling. Integration of genomic information with clinical, extensive physiological data, and metadata (individual patient exposures and status measures that affect health) is spawning new bioinformatics approaches that have yet to mature.…”

“…Some environmental variables may be challenging to quantify (e.g., the built environment) but may be recorded as metadata associated with the experimental results and important for interpretation of the data. This figure describes primarily the data that may be captured for analyses, and a separate process captures the analysis pipeline immunology (Afacan et al 2012), and systems analysis (Palsson 2006) can be applied to malnutrition research specifically to:…”