Bioguided Processing: A Paradigm Change in Food Production

individual dietary needs, and facilitate more personalized nutrition. In the past few centuries, we have used our knowledge of the physical and biological sciences to improve the situation of our daily lives. In the 19th century, a fundamental knowledge of chemistry was acquired, and Mendeleev’s periodic table began to take shape. This knowledge not only provided a deeper understanding of our world and ourselves, but also became applicable as the means to manipulate molecular structures to address specific end-points. Moving into the 20th century, knowledge of chemistry was used to affect and manipulate biology; examples of this activity range from pharmaceuticals to synthetic fertilizers to pesticides and food ingredients. These compounds not only changed the yields achievable on a given area of land, but also illustrated the ability to rationally modify agriculture and food production using scientific knowledge. However, chemical techniques have broad specificity in biological applications and thus do not offer precise control. In the 21st century, it will be our knowledge of biology and biological processes emerging from genomics which will guide our approaches to agriculture and food production toward sustainable, safe, nutritious, and delicious products. Functional genomics is a term which has been applied to the field of discovering gene activities, and is a logical followup to genome acquisition. A beneficial by-product of functional genomics investigations will be the ability to use our mechanistic understanding of biology’s structures and Bioguided Processing: A Paradigm Change in Food Production