Eaders’ involvement through editorials and commentaries, position papers (e.g., [46]), project ideas (e.g., [99]), literature highlights (e.g., [85]), as well as novel formulas leaving the authors a space for freely debating their opinions on the most “provocative” scientific issues relevant to the aims and scope of the journal (e.g., [75]). Our overall goal is to contribute to shaping the identity of the growing field of nutritional systems biology, interfacing personalized nutrition and preventive medicine, which started blooming within the molecular nutrition community in the twenty-first century.Guidelines, standards, and reproducibility of scientific data and findings The application of advanced genomics technologies to nutrition (nutrigenomics) provides foundational knowledge for advancing nutrient ealth associations for analysis of underlying mechanisms. High-throughput omics technologies are increasingly used to identify the often intertwined pathways of nutrient-dependent modulation of gene expression (at the gene, protein, metabolite levels) and/or epigenomic modifications, towards mechanistic understanding of nutrient-driven molecular processes at the system level [101]. Similar to all other fields of science applying such tools, successful outcome of sensitive molecular purchase RDX5791 approaches requires a high degree of standardization at all levels of the experimental process, to limit confounders to a minimum and enable testing for reproducibility, thus avoiding generation of conflicting results. Genes Nutrition has been frontline in requesting standardization of data, tools, and services. With this Editorial, we wish to endorse the agreed “Principles and Guidelines for Reporting Preclinical Research” (https://www.nih.gov/research-training/rigorreproducibility/principles-guidelines-reporting-preclinicalresearch) jointly issued by major scientific journals to support scientific rigor and reproducibility [65]. In addition to standard requirements for human ethics and animal welfare, we highlight here the minimal requirements of our specific journal regarding standardization of nutritional studies, building and expanding on the shared policies of BMC Journals which request compliance to widely accepted guidelines (Table 1).Human genetic dataGenes Nutrition was among the first specialty journals to focus on studies of the effects of nutrients on the expression of genetic information in humans and howgenetic makeup alters the metabolism of nutrients [73, 83, 91, 108]. Perhaps no area of modern biomedical research has progressed as rapidly and contributed as profoundly as the analysis of genome sequence and structure. The NCBI list of completely or nearly completed sequenced genomes shows 3716 eukaryotes (plant and animal), 75,302 prokaryotes, 5962 viruses, 7799 plasmids, and 8748 organelle DNAs (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ genome/browse/, accessed 16 October 2016). The production of sequence data has far outpaced the ability to understand how genetic makeup influences phenotype or responds to nutrition and other environmental factors. Linking genetic loci that co-segregate with the trait within families (i.e., linkage analysis) proved PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27741243 highly successful using DNA molecular markers (rev in [74]). Over 1000 human monogenic diseases were identified by the year 2000 [42]. Exome and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) can now identify rare deleterious mutations in individuals [20], and comparison to parents or siblings enriches the chances of linki.