Semantics of Dairy Fermented Foods: A Microbiologist's Perspective

Area of Science:

• Nutritional Science
• Bioinformatics
• Food Science

Background:

• Food ontologies are crucial for standardizing nutrition research terminology.
• Fermented foods offer live microorganisms, acting as potential "genetic/functional" nutrients.
• A dedicated ontology for describing fermented foods is currently lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a semantic representation for fermented foods, focusing on technological and health aspects.
• To formalize concepts related to microbial taxa, gene pathways, and metabolites in dairy fermentation.
• To improve the integration of diverse nutritional science data.

Main Methods:

• Described a semantic representation of concepts for fermented foods.
• Focused on kefir and Parmigiano Reggiano as representative dairy products.
• Included concepts linking microbial taxa to fermentation, gene pathways, metabolites, and product outcomes.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated the potential of ontologies to formalize gene pathways in raw ingredient transformation.
• Connected microbial processes to resulting metabolites and their impact on technological, health, and sensory aspects.
• Showcased a harmonized semantic model for integrating various facets of nutritional science.

Conclusions:

• The developed ontology improves the formalization of knowledge surrounding fermented foods.
• This semantic model is pivotal for annotating data in public repositories.
• It serves as a prerequisite for generalized meta-analysis in nutritional science.