Personnel Structure

Currently, the Food Science Center consists of two research labs. There are 19 people in the Food Science Center. Among them, 2 doctoral supervisors, 2 research scientists, 1 associate research scientists, 2 the High-level Talents in Shenzhen, 4 post-doctorals, and 7 graduate students.

Objectives

Focusing on food safety and personalized nutrition, based on foodomics and big health data, the Food Science Center is committed to:

1.  Enrich food-related multi-omics databases that document information about genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome;

2. Through big health data mining, discover and remedy nutritional problems that are specific to subpopulations with identified needs;

3. Develop a "table-to-farm" innovation approach that is driven by consumers' demand(as opposed to the traditional, prevailing "farm-to-table" model);

4. Formulate theoretical/practical guidelines for food quality standardization, intelligent manufacturing, food preservation, and transportation.

Research Areas

One Mission ("the design for personalized food"), Three Research Themes (Foodomics, Gut metagenomics and human health, and Human perception of food), and Four Supporting Systems (the International Food Valley Alliance, the Food Safety Standards Laboratory, the International Food Policy Think Tank and the Integrated Data Management System).

1. Foodomics

Foodomics combines food, analytical omics technology and bioinformatics to study food-related genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. We are expanding our research scope to include all the data collected from farm to table(including production, circulation, and consumption) and envision that these foodomics data will revolutionize our approaches to the pressing issues in biodiversity, safety, and quality, and traceability of food.

2. Gut metagenomics and human health

On the one hand, we will build a variety of biological mechanism-based, multi-scale biological network models that can, for instance, integrate metabolic, gene regulatory and signaling pathways, or mathematically describe the tripartite relationship between food, human gut and microbiota; On the other hand, we can resort to statistical methods to correlate the gut microbiota with all possible relevant diseases (such as diabetes and obesity), explain their pathogeneses, and further suggest intervention strategies.

3. Human perception of food

Why can food preferences be so different among people, and change many times over an individual's life span? We will address this question by studying the human perception of food, and this research theme, as the name suggests, comprises food (especially its sensory attributes) and human perception. The sensory attributes, among the most important drivers of food consumption preferences, mainly include appearance, texture, aroma, taste, and irritation; these attributes are perceived by the primary human senses: visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and chemesthesis, respectively.In the beginning, we will investigate the relationship between one pair of food attributes and human sense at a time. At a later stage, we will need to tackle multiple sensory attributes simultaneously, considering that food sensory attributes interact with each other in the same way as human senses do; Such interactions would lead to a systematic understanding of the complexity of human perception of food.

In addition, to promote the integration of industry, education, and research, the Food Science Center is also establishing four supporting platforms, including the International Food Valley Alliance(industry incubation platform), the Food Safety Standards Laboratory (laboratory testing platform), the International Food Policy Think Tank (expert advisor platform), and the Integrated Data Management System (omics data management platform).

Labs

Gengjie Jia's Lab

Xinjie Wang's Lab