InSyBio, through its participation in the Virtuous Project together with a prestigious team of researchers and industry players, has recently contributed to the implementation of the Virtuous Umami tool, a tool which can accurately predict the umami taste. This machine learning-based tool was tested against five databases related to foods or natural compounds and demonstrated an unprecedented accuracy, while also identifying a set of features which are representative of the Umami taste.
The technology for this tool was published (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25935-3) in the Scientific Reports journal of the Springer Nature publishing company, while the corresponding web tool is publicly available (http://195.251.58.251:19009/#/virtuous-umami).
The umami taste is the one of the five basic taste modalities that has been associated with a pleasant taste in food. The implementation of fast and cost-effective tools to predict the umami taste of a molecule presents an interesting challenge: how to facilitate the effective rationalisation of the production and consumption of specific foods and ingredients. More details about computational taste prediction and the molecular understanding of human taste can be found in our latest survey articles: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924224421004519 and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00217-022-04044-5
The vision of the Virtuous project, as previously stated by Dr. Marco Agostino Deriu, is to “build an intelligent machine able to decrypt a sensation by modelling the biophysical architecture of our body, covering all required competences for this ambitious challenge, starting from molecular and multiscale modelling techniques, to artificial intelligence algorithms; experimental facilities to analyze natural product typical of the Mediterranean diet such as wine and oil“
Labros Digonis, CEO of InSyBio, commented saying: “The implementation of Umami Taste is a significant milestone for InSyBio. It is a materialization of our precision nutrition vision and a great case study of how the use of our technology provides a deep insight into and facilitates the design of new food products.. Within the context of the Virtuous project, we will continue working to generate a cost-efficient and accurate computational infrastructure and set of tools to facilitate a more targeted food product design and the understanding of human taste“.
About Virtuous: The EU-funded VIRTUOUS project (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) – https://virtuoush2020.com/) is dedicated to the development of a virtual tongue made by an integrated computational framework that can screen food for natural components by binding taste receptors. This international consortium includes eight academic and industry participants from four European countries. Using a variety of computational and experimental data, partners plan to create an algorithm for the prediction of the organoleptic profile of the food based on its chemical composition. The potential application of this platform as a taste predictor is in the food industry, modern precision agriculture, and as a link to neuroscience for taste determination.
About InSyBio: InSyBio is an international pioneer bioinformatics revolutionizing the medical field, clinical trials and food/nutrition industries through targeted biomarker discovery and highly-accurate predictive analytics.
Its solutions provide the R&D departments of Pharma, Research Institutes and Food/Nutrition companies, with the means both analytically and computationally, to meet their challenging research and innovation goals (such as robust biomarker discovery and accurate predictive models). This is done through a sophisticated, software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which comprehensively integrates multi-omics data reducing the number of samples and additional validation experiments needed. Since 2013, InSyBio has worked with hundreds of academics, large and small companies, hospitals and research centers allowing them to succeed in their biomarker discovery tasks with an increase of at least 10% in predictive accuracy and decrease of at least 80% in overall time and cost.
Visit www.insybio.com to see how InSyBio can help you reach your R&D goals in the era of Precision Medicine and Nutrition.