Dietary microRNAs: Current status and perspective in food science

Food safety and health conditions are global issues that are primarily caused by insufficient nutrition or contaminated food, which have enormous social, economic, and public health implications. Foodomics study mainly involves nutrigenomics, nutrigenetics, and nutritional epigenetics, which help in finding the correlation between genetic variation and nutrient-driven epigenetic alterations that are suggested as a primary challenge to nutritional needs. Micro-ribonucleic acids (miRNAs) are non-coding RNA molecules that have recently gained in popularity as a result of their critical roles in gene regulation and nutritional studies. In this commentary, the relevance of miRNAs to human nutrition is discussed. This study emphasizes the importance of dietary miRNAs based on numerous independent studies, which have explained the unique characteristics of dietary miRNAs in terms of gene expression regulation mechanism. There is an urgent requirement of measurement techniques to detect miRNA in food and evolutionary samples. These techniques may be helpful to find even low levels of miRNAs because of their high susceptibility and selectivity. There is a desperate requisite to evaluate the impact of dietary supplement compounds on circulating and tissue miRNAs. Food science studies in humans may aid in the identification of novel biomarkers and other necessary mode of action of certain dietary compounds, with the goal of facilitating how nutrients and bioactive components can influence miRNAs and enforce biological effects. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: Dietary microRNAs may be helpful to find even the low levels of miRNAs due to their high susceptibility and selectivity. There is also desperate need to evaluate the impact of dietary supplement compounds effect on circulating and tissue miRNAs. There is also requirement for new analytical tools to study the role of gene regulations and nutrition in different diseases. The quality of dietary miRNAs should be investigated, particularly the exogenous types which are used as high doses in food supplements. It would also be of great interest to use antagomir technology in food science research, in addition to omics technology. Dietary miRNAs may also aid in the identification of novel biomarkers. These are some of the practical applications of dietary miRNAs.