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Personalized nutrition is fast becoming a reality due to a number of technological, scientific, and societal developments that complement and extend current public health nutrition recommendations. Personalized nutrition tailors dietary recommendations to specific biological requirements on the basis of a person's health status and goals. The biology underpinning these recommendations is complex, and thus any recommendations must account for multiple biological processes and subprocesses occurring in various tissues and must be formed with an appreciation for how these processes interact with dietary nutrients and environmental factors. Therefore, a systems biology-based approach that considers the most relevant interacting biological mechanisms is necessary to formulate the best recommendations to help people meet their wellness goals. Here, the concept of "systems flexibility" is introduced to personalized nutrition biology. Systems flexibility allows the real-time evaluation of metabolism and other processes that maintain homeostasis following an environmental challenge, thereby enabling the formulation of personalized recommendations. Examples in the area of macro- and micronutrients are reviewed. Genetic variations and performance goals are integrated into this systems approach to provide a strategy for a balanced evaluation and an introduction to personalized nutrition. Finally, modeling approaches that combine personalized diagnosis and nutritional intervention into practice are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSCs) are advancing into the clinic but the therapeutic efficacy of hMSCs faces the problem of donor variability. In bone tissue engineering, no reliable markers have been identified which are able to predict the bone-forming capacity of hMSCs prior to implantation. To this end, we isolated hMSCs from 62 donors and characterized systematically their in vitro lineage differentiation capacity, gene expression signature and in vivo capacity for ectopic bone formation. Our data confirms the large variability of in vitro differentiation capacity which did not correlate with in vivo ectopic bone formation. Using DNA microarray analysis of early passage hMSCs we identified a diagnostic bone-forming classifier. In fact, a single gene, CADM1, strongly correlated with the bone-forming capacity of hMSCs and could be used as a reliable in vitro diagnostic marker. Furthermore, data mining of genes expressed correlating with in vivo bone formation represented involvement in neurogenic processes and Wnt signaling. We will apply our data set to predict therapeutic efficacy of hMSCs and to gain novel insight in the process of bone regeneration. Our bio-informatics driven approach may be used in other fields of cell therapy to establish diagnostic markers for clinical efficacy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]