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

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.