Immunodietica: A data-driven approach to investigate interactions between diet and autoimmune disorders

Abstract

Autoimmunity is on the rise around the globe. Diet has been proposed as a risk factor for autoimmunity and shown to modulate the severity of several autoimmune disorders. Yet, the interaction between diet and autoimmunity in humans remains largely unstudied.Here, we systematically interrogated commonly consumed animals and plants for peptide epitopes previously implicated in human autoimmune disease. A total of fourteen species investigated could be divided into three broad categories regarding their content in human autoimmune epitopes, which we represented using a new metric, the Gershteyn-Ferreira index (GF index). Strikingly, pig contains a disproportionately high number of unique autoimmune epitopes compared to all other species analyzed. This work uncovers a potential new link between pork consumption and autoimmunity in humans and lays the foundation for future studies on the impact of diet on the pathogenesis and progression of autoimmune disorders.

Immune-Mediated Uveitis and Lifestyle Factors: A Review

“…In addition, the enhanced immune responses from uveitis patients to the 3 antigens compared with healthy controls indicate the pathogenic potential of food antigens. Similarly, a data-driven approach found that pigs shared unique epitopes with 40 immune-mediated diseases, including Behcet’s disease [68]. The study revealed that food is a vast library of self-antigens, and taking advantage of bioinformatics approaches to find more dietary autoimmune epitopes is vital for eliminating self-antigens from diet of uveitis patients.…”