Food biotechnology as a field of study began as a nascent area of investigation in late 1970s to early 1980s with the advent in advances in biotechnology, where understanding of cellular to ecological systems were now being defined at the genetic and molecular level from the genetic code in DNA to transcription via mRNA and to protein synthesis at the ribosomes. With the advent of gene splicing, termed as “recombinant DNA” or generally as “genetic engineering,” this was now being investigated and explored across diverse cellular systems; therefore, food-relevant cellular systems associated with food production, processing, quality and safety were an exciting area of applications of this emerging field.
Our visionary founding editor Professor Dietrich Knorr provided the early exciting impetus for the journal in 1986 and covered key areas from cellular and molecular biology of food processing, quality and safety to upstream and downstream processing of food relevant biological systems. Professor Knorr began the journal when he was at University of Delaware, Newark, USA before the journal settled in his new home in Germany at TU Berlin. It was his singular vision and the energy of the initial group of reviewers in the USA and Europe that shaped this journal in the early phase. We as a global community working in the field of food biotechnology and related biological processing areas are grateful for his guidance through its inception in 1986 to 2000. Professor Knorr then took on new challenges in advancing the field of food science and technology starting the new journal of Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies. At this stage I was grateful to have his trust to carry forward the journal since 2001 to date, initially from 2001 to 2012 from University of Massachusetts in Amherst and now at North Dakota State University in Fargo.
The journal since 2001 further built on the vision of Professor Knorr, gradually focusing the key thrust of the emerging field that was now metabolically interfaced and being driven by more systems-based concepts. Metabolically-driven systems logic that encompasses molecular basis for food production, processing, quality, and safety is where advances are emerging and moving forward. This is especially evident in human health, where the role of a healthy microbiome is rapidly influencing health and wellness, and therefore fermented foods and associated microbiomes have become critical metabolic and molecular interfaces between ecology of food systems to human health. Further in the areas of food production and processing, concepts such as molecular breeding, detection, and marker technologies for identification, metabolic biology and genetic engineering for food production systems and quality are shaping the field. Similarly, in the area of food quality and safety, rapid molecular detection systems to metabolic interfaces used to monitor biological quality and safety are driving the field.
As we move forward beyond this 30th issue and the year 2016, integrated global challenges from agricultural and food production to human health impact and ecological consequences of food systems will shape the field of food biotechnology. This is now driven by a more integrated and systems logic rationale, driven by molecular and metabolic control points across the food systems landscape from diversity of agro-food ecological systems that are increasingly localized as well as globalized. Such biologically robust and interfaced food production and processing systems are better integrated with molecular and metabolically driven food quality and safety monitoring and control systems. Further, all these tools of food production, processing, and quality are being robustly linked and interfaced with the needs of human and animal health and wellness (especially relevance of microbiomes). These exciting developments are further shaped by needs of sustainable ecology, in which humanity and the human-dependent larger ecology has to thrive with serious consequences from a rapidly changing climate that will affect global food security and overall wellness. These challenges will shape research, which will also drive how the journal will move forward and shape scientific advances, with a wider global audience and populace whose future is all interlinked to our common humanity and common interlinked earth’s ecology in which we live and share.
The journal would not have moved forward without the exceptional support of the reviewers, whose tireless efforts I am very grateful for. We are all grateful for all the submissions and we have done our best to be fair and objective. As globalization widens the educational imperatives and expansion of research-driven universities across the globe, our author, reviewer, editor, and reader audiences will be more global. We will strive to reflect these rapid global demographic changes and shifts.
In closing, thank you all for supporting Food Biotechnology, and I look forward to working with you to advance this important journal to new heights and success. Please feel free to email me any comments and reflections that are constructive and advance the journal. Thank you for this opportunity to write this editorial.
Kind regards,
Kalidas Shetty