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While she was doing field work in Morocco, ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed realized that she needed to pursue a PhD in biology. In 2003, she was in the country completing her master’s thesis on the role of argan oil in the livelihoods the Berber community. The farmers Ahmed spoke with told her that they could tell that the quality of their oils was affected by the environmental conditions in which argan trees grew. Could she, as a scientist, explain how the bioactive compounds in the oil were changing?
“I was a master’s student in an ethnobotany program, so I absolutely did not have the capacity to provide any data on what it is in food that determines food quality,” Ahmed says. So she went back to school to learn how to characterize and quantify those biological molecules. The next step seemed obvious to Ahmed: take the tools she learned in her PhD and use them in her postdoctoral position to determine how bioactive compounds might affect human health. From there, she became a professor of sustainable food systems at Montana State University.
▸ Birthplace: Lahore, Pakistan
▸ Current location: Bozeman, Montana
▸ Favorite place to eat: The upland Indigenous Akha communities of southwestern Yunnan province in China. Many community members there manage their agroecosystems for food quality based on sensory and healing attributes as well as traditional ecological knowledge and cultural identity.
▸ A favorite food: Berries. The PTFI database has fascinating data on the biomolecular diversity of a range of berries, from mountain huckleberries to beautyberry.
▸ Best career advice you’ve gotten: Follow your bliss. Work on your passion project, always. Keep yourself grounded with your higher purpose.
Ahmed now leads the Periodic Table of Food Initiative—a global program aimed at linking agricultural practices to differences in food biochemistries. By making these links, she says, the organization can help empower food producers to make data-driven choices to maximize the quality of food being grown.
Fionna Samuels spoke with Ahmed about what the Periodic Table of Food Initiative is and how it aims to improve the future of food systems. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
What got you involved with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative?
I learned about the Periodic Table of Food Initiative when it was just starting. I was very excited that the aim of the initiative was to develop the standardized tools to look at the components of food that determine food quality.
Being a professor and having a research program was really rewarding. The one aspect that I was also yearning for was doing science at a global scale. And that’s exactly what the Periodic Table of Food Initiative offered. I came to the PTFI because it really met my mission and vision of making food quality a central measurement in how we manage food systems.
Now I serve as the global director. So I’m not the person who gets to go to the farm to collect samples anymore. Now my role is enabling a beautiful ecosystem of global partners that are leading that work.
What questions does PTFI research try to answer?
Some of our big research questions are: What is in food? That’s really an entire scientific enterprise–wide question that we have at PTFI. How does the composition of food vary based on environmental factors? So variation based on the agricultural practices that a farmer might have, the climate or the weather at specific times, the biodiversity of the system, and soil quality. And finally, what are implications of this variation on our food quality for both people and the planet? That’s really thinking about managing food. We might know which compounds are in food, but what are their actual roles in how agricultural systems are functioning? What is the impact to us, as consumers of these foods, for our health?
How does the initiative try to answer these questions?
We have some research projects that investigators within our internal team are leading, and we have other research projects that our international centers of excellence are leading. We have a center of excellence on each continent. Each is utilizing the standardized foodomics tools that we have developed to map the food quality of their regional and local edible biodiversity.
What is foodomics?
It is the comprehensive analysis of the components of a food using omics technologies. Foodomics has really been made possible by advances in high-resolution mass spectrometry. And advances in computational power and machine learning have allowed us to understand the thousands of biomolecules that are in food.
Are these biomolecules different from those you’d find on a food label?
The macronutrients and micronutrients on a label are very important components of what’s in food, but they represent only a part of what’s there. In addition to what’s on the label, there are thousands of other components that are impacting our health. There are those that are often recognized in fruits and vegetables to have anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and other protective powers. There are also all sorts of other exogenous components that enter food during the agricultural process that might have deleterious impacts on our health. In fact, the PTFI database currently shows over 18,000 specialized metabolites and 420,000 unique proteins in commonly consumed foods.
As we’re shifting in society from widespread food insecurity, to a stage of diet- related chronic disease, it is becoming more important to understand what all these other components in food might be.
Walk me through what the PTFI process looks like for a food item.
For one study, we are really interested in thinking about how the composition of an apple varies based on agricultural practices. So, in addition to measuring what is in food, we’re developing metadata modules which provide context for each sample.
If we want to understand all the variation in apples, we’ll have maybe five different fields where our partners have collected apples. During collection, they’re recording how the farmer has managed the specific field and they’re recording when the apple was harvested. Then that sample comes to a lab.
In the United States, we have two key labs that we’re working with on sample processing, one at the University of California, Davis, and one at Colorado State University, in Jessica Prenni’s lab. Her team will process the sample, and then it gets analyzed using all PTFI’s standardized multiomics tools: metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, and ionomics.
Key to this process, which makes PTFI’s tools unique, is that we’re using a set of standardized internal reagents. So the samples that are analyzed in Prenni’s lab will have comparable data if we send the same sample to our colleagues at UC Davis.
That data gets uploaded into our standardized data pipeline, where we’re able to automatically annotate and identify the compounds in a sample. Because we have the metadata on where an apple was collected and the agricultural practices there, as we continue to scale up that research, we can begin to identify specific agricultural practices that make a notable impact on the final nutrient density or quality of this apple. That data is made available at the MarkerLab and the American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform.
How do you see this research affecting people?
We really want to drive this paradigm shift in understanding food quality and making that a central parameter of managing food systems. We really want to advance standardized foodomics methodologies so that researchers around the world—chemists, biologists, and others—are using standardized methodologies so that data can be compiled in a harmonious way.
I think if we make food quality an essential parameter of managing food systems, food systems are going to be healthier for both people and the planet.
What do you hope our food systems look like in 50 years—and beyond?
I see a future where everyone has enough to eat; where food is safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate, and delicious; where farmers can grow food in ways that nourish local ecosystems and address diet-related diseases in their communities; where we leverage food’s power as an essential resource for human and planetary well-being.
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