Functional food genomics in Japan – State of the art

Nutrigenomics uses transcriptomics to comprehensively investigate the effects of various nutrients on the body. In Japan, nutrigenomics has primarily been applied to functional food science. However, human nutrigenomics data are quite complex, because they are inherently noisy, reflecting subtle changes in response to nutrients. To detect minute changes in response to such a complex input of genetic information, elaborate and efficient experimental methods and statistics are necessary. This review discusses the applicability of genomics for evaluating the otherwise undeterminable effects of functional factors in the particular case of (R)-(-)-linalool as a useful stress suppressor.