Innovations at the Interface of Biology and Computation: A New Frontier in Food Safety

Abstract

Food safety has become one of the most crucial global challenges as a result of globalizing supply chains and food diversity. Today's cutting-edge technologies provide extensive data resources for profiling foodborne pathogens, elucidating food interactions and analyzing their dynamics. However, there are significant gaps in the translation of this diverse and extensive data collection into practical solutions, and holistic and comprehensive perspectives are urgently required to overcome these gaps. The practical use of computational biology and bioinformatics methods, which have been the most important force behind the development of biotechnological innovations in recent years, is still relatively insufficient in food safety. There is a great need for innovative and holistic perspectives for food biotechnology applications, which are mostly limited to omics-based profiling-focused approaches. In this context, this review aims to expand the narrow omics-based perspective of food safety approaches based on computational biology and bioinformatics methods. Unlike other existing reviews, this review takes a holistic perspective not only on metagenomics and omics approaches, but also on structural modeling, functional annotation, AI-based analyses and case studies. In this context, the article does not merely propose a roadmap in a prescriptive sense, but rather suggests potential directions-such as enhancing pathogen surveillance systems, encouraging data harmonization across omics platforms, and fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations-that could guide future research efforts.