The fruitful collaboration between UTAR and Jinan University (JNU), China, was signified with the webinar, jointly organised by the institutions on 6 December 2022 via Zoom. The webinar was moderated by Faculty of Science (FSc) Department of Agricultural and Food Science Head Dr Ong Mei Kying and JNU academic Dr Lingmin Tian.

The first speaker was JNU academic Dr Wenwen Yu, who spoke on “A general approach for predicting the glycaemic index (GI) of carbohydrate foods”. Dr Yu highlighted, “Over-processed food has become one of the most important factors affecting national health. The incidences of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as diabetes are increasing dramatically. The digestion and absorption of glycaemic carbohydrates are one of the most important causes of elevated postprandial blood sugar.”

He explained GI as the indicator of blood glucose content after consumption of the same weight of available carbohydrates. Participants also learnt that GI value is one of the most important nutritional indicators of carbohydrate foods. However, Dr Yu pointed out that in vivo blood sugar test is still considered the ‘gold standard’ for food GI tests. He explained that besides providing real data, in vivo blood sugar test is also presented with challenging factors, including ethical limitations, high cost, low efficiency, low reproducibility, and not suitable for high-throughput screening.

Towards the end, he presented some of the challenges faced, including (1) the difficulty in acquiring data on available carbohydrates, (2) the lack of certain type of standard carbohydrate foods for calibration, (3) the lack of in vivo data, and (3) identifying that the effects of food composition is probably more important than the GI or GL value itself. While sharing the direction of his future research, Dr Yu also talked about the influences of low GI carbohydrate foods with different recipes on human faecal fermentation characteristics, and gut microbial community in vitro. In his conclusion, he noted that the in vitro digestion kinetics shows great potential in the rapid prediction of the GI values of carbohydrate foods. He also suggested that distinct prediction models should be established for different food.

The next speaker, FSc academic Dr Ee Kah Yaw, spoke on “Recent advances in discovering new plant-based bioactive peptides”. He shared ways of identifying bioactive peptides and ripening metabolism through Omics technologies, Bioinformatics, and the combination of Omics technologies and Bioinformatics. He also enlightened participants on in silico enzymatic hydrolysis to release bioactive peptides, which also encompasses information on the physiochemical properties, toxicity, allergenicity, and human intestinal absorption.

He also explained that the combination of Omics technologies and Bioinformatics provide new perspectives into bioactive peptides and fruit ripening metabolism research. However, Dr Ee also pointed out some of the challenges, which were— to have reliable data, it depended on appropriate experimental designs, up-to-date database, and bioinformatics software. He also questioned the sufficiency of the in-depth in vivo and clinical studies in discovering the absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion profile of the bioactive compounds; and the ability of the high sensitivity, accuracy and precision data in assisting the establishment of regulations on the application of bioactive compounds in food products.

Dr Ee also shared about his future studies and the challenges faced. He explained that he aimed to use bioinformatics data to further characterise the responsible peptides components; apply purification and isolation of responsible peptides for food development; incorporate in vitro and in vivo experiments to confirm their potential bioactivities, mechanisms, and safety; and employ a combination of Omics technologies for a more comprehensive discovery.