The bioactive compounds in foods are food components that provide specific health benefits (improving health or reducing the risk of disease) beyond basic nutritional functions. They influence the onset, progression, severity, or prevention of diseases through a direct or indirect action on the human genome. This interaction between genes and nutrition occurs in both directions: nutrients modulate gene expression (nutrigenomics), while genes determine the effect of the diet (nutrigenetics).

Bioactive compounds interact with transcription factors, altering gene expression, or with proteins, modifying their levels and functions. Therefore, the use of omics technologies to analyze gene expression, protein abundance, and metabolite levels offers the possibility of deciphering signaling pathways and cellular processes to explain functional mechanisms and the intermediate molecules involved. We can investigate how exposure to different diets, foods, or dietary components affects the transcriptome, proteome, or metabolome globally, identifying the effect of bioactive components on homeostatic regulation, and how this regulation is altered in certain chronic diseases.

The objectives of this research line are:

• Development of a multi-omics platform for the study of bioactivity mechanisms.
• Identify bioactivity mechanisms and the most relevant targets in animal and plant-derived bioactives – Nutrigenomics (multi-omics).
• Conduct human studies: classification into groups with different bioactivity responses, differential mechanisms, and biomarkers (Nutrigenomics + Nutrigenetics, Precision Nutrition approach).
• Study of bioactivity in human pathology, with cancer and metabolic syndrome-related disorders being of the greatest interest.