Meeting Report from “Frontiers in Nutritional Science: Nutritional Metabolomics”

1. Preface The potential for transforming nutritional and health research through the discovery and application of non-invasive markers of dietary intake and metabolic status is profound. The science of metabolomics for the fingerprinting of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from expired human breath holds great promise in this regard. Coupled with tools utilising sensor technology, breath volatile signatures allow a new horizon of research in which indicators of metabolic risk and indicators of dietary intake could be collected at a population level with unprecedented simplicity and low cost. Metabolomics (measuring metabolites from physiological process) provides a " window into the body " , which could transform how we measure health, how we identify and monitor people most at risk of disease and the way we monitor food intake. To stimulate interest and cooperation in this frontier field of health sciences, in August 2013, CSIRO in collaboration with the University of South Australia, and ILSI Southeast Asian Region organised a symposium which aimed to explore opportunities for using metabolomics to improve human health by nutritional means. This one-day symposium brought together international and national experts to provide a comprehensive, contemporary overview of this emerging field. The event aimed to provide food and health science professionals and researchers, an exciting trajectory of how nutritional metabolomics may be applied to enlarge our understanding of how food, diet and the body interact. In particular, this symposium connected researchers from diverse fields of metabolomics. These ranged from physicians and researchers applying breath tests for disease diagnosis, sensory scientists with a knowledge of volatile compounds in foods, nutritional physiologists exploring breath compounds following dietary interventions to engineers developing sensor technologies for point of OPEN ACCESS