A unified knowledge graph linking foodomics to chemical-disease networks and flavor profiles
Modern nutrition science still lacks a comprehensive, machine-readable map linking diet to molecular composition and biological effects. Here we present FoodAtlas, a large-scale knowledge graph that links 1430 foods to 3610 chemicals, 2181 diseases, and 958 flavor descriptors through 96,981 provenance-tracked edges. A transformer-based text-mining pipeline extracted 48,474 quantitative food-chemical associations from 125,723 literature sentences (F<sub>1</sub> = 0.67) and integrated them with 23,211 chemical-disease assertions from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, 15,222 chemical-bioactivity records from ChEMBL, 3645 flavor annotations from FlavorDB and PubChem, and 6429 taxonomic relationships. Graph embeddings revealed six dietary modules whose signature metabolites delineate distinct, multisystem disease-risk trajectories. Models built on FoodAtlas demonstrate practical utility: a bioactivity predictor achieved strong correlation with antioxidant assays (R² = 0.52; ρ = 0.72), and a substitution engine reduced simulated total disease risk by 11.9%.
Authors
- Jason Youn (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5925-0261)
- Ilias Tagkopoulos (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1104-7616)
- Fangzhou Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7623-719X)
- Kaichi Xie
- Pranav Gupta
- Arielle Yoo
- Trevor Chan
- Keer Ni
- Michael Gunning
Institutions
- AO Foundation (CH)
- Next Generation Technology (United States) (US)
- University of California, Davis (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Science of Food
- Published
- 2026-01-20
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00680-9
- Primary Topic
- Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- U.S. Department of Agriculture
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture