The Phenol-Explorer database has been developed at INRA, Unité de Nutrition Humaine (Centre de Recherche de Clermont-Ferrand, France) in collaboration with CIQUAL-AFSSA (Maisons-Alfort, France) and the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada).
The project has been supported by the NUTRIALIS program of the French Ministry of Research (2002-2004) and by Unilever, Danone and Nestlé (2005-2009).
The version 1.0 of the Phenol-Explorer database was released in August 2009.
The following persons contributed to the Phenol-Explorer project:
Augustin SCALBERT coordinated the project.
Vanessa NEVEU, Femke VOS, Jara PEREZ-JIMENEZ and Vanessa CRESPY compiled and evaluated the over 60,000 original data from the scientific literature. Laure DU CHAFFAUT (CIQUAL-AFSSA) developed the initial structure of the database in Access, together with the partners of the NUTRIALIS project ‘Constitution d'une base de données et d’une table de composition alimentaire nationale sur les polyphénols’ and provided her expertise on food composition tables.
Vanessa NEVEU (left) and Femke VOS (right)
Vanessa NEVEU developed the methods for data aggregation to produce the mean content values and defined the specifications for the webserver.
Craig KNOX, Roman EISNER and Joseph CRUZ (University of Alberta and In Siliflo, Edmonton, Canada) developed the webserver.
Vanessa NEVEU, Femke VOS and Jara PEREZ-JIMENEZ wrote the reports on the variability of polyphenol content in the different categories of foods.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Louise MENNEN (UMR INSERM unit 557/INRA unit 1125/CNAM, Centre de Recherche en Nutrition Humaine, Paris, France) who first expressed the idea to develop such a database for epidemiological studies. She coordinated the NUTRIALIS project ‘Constitution d'une base de données et d’une table de composition alimentaire nationale sur les polyphénols’ from 2002 to 2004.
The authors are also grateful to the European Network of Excellence EuroFIR and to Jayne IRELAND (CIQUAL-AFSSA) for training the compilers and for helpful discussion and suggestions.