NUTRIGENE: AN ONLINE RESOURCE FOR PERSONALIZED NUTRITION

Abstract

Introduction: NutriGene is a manually curated database which is aimed at providing a freely accessible interactive databank of the interactions of human SNPs and disorders affected by nutrition along with supporting evidence in the form of already published studies. By doing so, NutriGene hopes to facilitate a freely available user-friendly platform that can show the significance of associations between human variations and dietary factors. Method: A comprehensive literature search was completed to retrieve all available evidences in the literature documenting association of the host genetic variability with nutrition. For the literature review, we explored NCBI-PubMed using the keywords, such as ‘nutritional genomics’, ‘nutritional science’, ‘nutrigenomics’, ‘nutrition genomics’, ‘nutrigenetics’, and ‘gene-diet interactions’. Data for each of the associated polymorphism was manually scrutinized and then documented when no discrepancy was observed in the entries. Result & Discussion: The database comprehensively includes genetic variants across all major populations and ethnicities. This information can be used for associative studies to uncover the role of genetic variants in a particular population that make them more susceptible to any chronic disorder on the basis of their diet. Mining the database for biologically meaningful information keeping these points in mind is likely to reveal unknown facts about the underlying causes of gene-diet interactions. Conclusion: In a nutshell, disease prevention and health optimizing measures could be achieved with the presence of such databank systems that can provide the information at least on already completed and proven studies which were conducted on a given set of population groups to figure out appropriate gene-diet interactions. Database URL: http://genomeinformatics.dtu.ac.in/nutrigene/