Bioinformatics: Current perspectives and future directions for food and nutritional research facilitated by a Food-Wiki database

• Bioinformatics, a necessary step to advance food and nutritional research.
• Examples of major disciplines that have benefited from the use of bioinformatics.
• Current uses of bioinformatics in food and nutrition to date.
• Creating a lexicon will facilitate the use of bioinformatics in food research.
• A wiki-like database for the advancement of food and nutritional research.

With the continued progression of the “omics” era, bioinformatics, a discipline concerned with the curation and interpretation of biological data by computational means, has seen widespread integration across life sciences. However, despite becoming very data rich disciplines in the past number of years, the role of bioinformatics in food and nutritional sciences is less appreciated. In this review, we present the current state of bioinformatics in food and nutritional sciences and offer exemplar templates from other fields where bioinformatic analyses have become an integral feature. Additionally, we propose the concept of a wiki-like food database that could greatly advance the capabilities of bioinformatics in food and nutritional research.