The emerging field of nutrigenomics, which aims to identify the genetic factors that influence the body’s response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression, is explored in a series of interdisciplinary reports and analyses in the December 2008 Special Issue (Volume 12, number 4) of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.

Nutrigenomic’s bidirectional approach to investigating how the genetic traits of an individual or population interact with their diet offers many possibilities for targeted clinical interventions and preventive medicine. These may include modifying either diet or the biochemical response to food exposure to prevent disease in individuals shown to be susceptible to the consequences of unfavorable dietary/genomic interactions. In the future, nutrigenomics may potentially help guide the development of customized diets based on an individual’s genetic make-up.