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Riccardo Velasco

Can we build our future food?

The popular sentence “One apple a day keeps the doctor away” is more scientific than one would think at first: there is no other food as rich as apples when it comes not only to the amount of minerals and vitamins, but also the its long list of metabolites that have shown potential benefits for human health.
The antioxidant effect of apples has been largely demonstrated, and other fruit components are associated to beneficial effects on the risk of cardiovascular diseases and even cancer.
Completing the sequence of the genome of any species reveals a huge amount of information, that might be difficult to handle but opens the way to understanding how a plant works, how it produces fruits, how it accumulates beneficial metabolites; everything is contained into this sort of “Bible” that is the genome.
Sequencing approaches of a new generation (“High throughput sequencing”) now make it possible to reconstruct the genome of a species, and to resequence all the “variants” of genomes that characterise the different varieties of a species (i.e. for apples: Golden Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Red Delicious, Braeburn, and so on).
High throughput is not only a specificity of genomics – the new holistic genetic approach to reveal the entire content of the genetic information – but also of the other “omics”: disciplines such as metabolomics (the entire pattern of metabolites present in a fruit) or proteomics (all the proteins present in the same fruit). Hence, it is now possible to correlate the genetic information with the biochemical information, and based on this comparison to it is possible to identify all the components and find the way to obtain them.
This creates the opportunity to “build” the food of the future (less chemistry, more biology) rich in beneficial ingredients.

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Riccardo Velasco, PhD

Fondazione Edmund Mach – Ist. Agrario San Michele all’Adige
Research and Innovation Center
Dept. of Genomics and Crop Biology
e-mail: riccardo.velasco@iasma.it