2 credits
Fall 2026 Lecture
This course will cover the two major sections: Functional Foods for Health and Foodomics. The Functional Foods for Health section focuses on the sources, chemistry, processing technologies, and bioavailability of functional food ingredients, as well as the relationships between diet and health outcomes. Emphasis is placed on critical evaluation of evidence and strategies for developing evidence-based functional foods with demonstrated health relevance. The Foodomics section covers experimental design principles, chromatography and mass spectrometry fundamentals, and foodomics workflows (untargeted and targeted metabolomics, lipidomics, phytochemical analysis, and microbiome profiling), and data interpretation. This section emphasizes the application of omics technologies to characterize foods for health and diet-host interactions and includes hands-on lipidomics and metabolomics projects designed to equip students with practical skills that can be directly applied to their own research.
Learning Outcomes1Identify and evaluate major classes of functional foods (e.g., phytochemical-, lipid-, carbohydrate-, protein-derived) and explain how their chemical composition underpins biological activity and health mechanisms.
2Interpret structure-function relationships of functional food components by understanding their molecular structures and key functional groups relevant to bioactivity, metabolism, and stability. Explain diet-host interactions and how these interactions inform strategies for developing evidence-based functional foods.
3Be familiar with common foodomics workflows, including metabolomics, lipidomics, phytochemical analysis, and microbiome profiling, while recognizing fundamental principles and analytical limitations.
4Apply foodomics tools and concepts to address scientific questions related to foods for health, diet-host interactions, or the student's own research area.
Restrictions
made by Purdue students.