Developing future food solutions: The power of in vitro digestion models and enginomics

Sustainable, diverse and high-quality food solutions for future generations require in depth control over food compositions, structures as well as understanding of their digestive fate. This talk will overview some of our current understanding of the intersections of food processing, food physicochemical properties and bioaccessibility of bioactives in the gut1. Specific emphasis will be drawn to the potential of in vitro digestion models and digestomic analyses to shed light on the complexity of protein nutritional values and protein digestion in adult men, women and elderly people. First, we will discuss the development of an in vitro bioreactor-based model used to highlight age-related differences in protein digestion and luminal peptidomic profiles 2,3. Second, we will describe the development of an in vitro digestion model recreating the unique GI conditions of healthy adult males and females based on 40 different clinical trials4. This model highlights the differential proteolysis of whey and soy proteins as demonstrated by SDS-PAGE, LC-MS and proteomic analyses which indicate differences in bioaccessibility of bioactive peptides. Overall, this talk emphasizes that development of future health-oriented food choices requires systematic investigation and elucidation of their digestive fate in different consumer. This will help extending our ability to rationally design future foods and optimize them to different consumers and desirable .

1. Orlien, V. et al. (2021) doi:10.1080/10408398.2021.1980763.

2. Shani Levi, C. et al. (2017) Food Hydrocoll. 69, 393–401.

3. David, S., et al. (2020) Foods 9, 1253.

4. Lajterer, C. et al. (2022) Food Hydrocoll. 132, 107850.