The Nutrigenomics Alliance

Today instead of going to the lab I went to a "Symposium on Nutritional and Epigenetic Interactions," and I'm not going to pretend that I actually know what that means. Anyway, Dr. Newman mentioned last week that four years ago UK had established an Animal Nutrigenomics Alliance with Alltech, a company that is headquartered in Lexington, but operates both locally and internationally. The company is focused on introducing technology into animal health research in a manner that's both efficient and sustainable, and in 2007 Alltech began its lecture series at UK. Today's symposium included three different lectures.

The first was "Omics Approaches for Epigenetic Analysis," given by Timothy Huang, Ph.D., from Ohio State University. He discussed how nutritional imbalances and exposure to environmental chemicals during early development may increase disease risk in adulthood, which I've heard before and I think that's easy enough to understand. However, his lecture focused more specifically on the mechanisms by which the disease risk was increased, such as through DNA methylation and histone modifications, which I've heard of but didn't quite understand. He also talked about how these changes are heritable, but genome-wide analysis could allow us to study epigenetic alterations and eventually fix or regulate these changes.

The second lecture was "Opportunities and Challenges for Using Nutrigenomics for Cancer Prevention," by John Milner, Ph.D., from the National Cancer Institute within the National Institutes of Health. He gave a description of the three elements of Nutrigenomics: nutrigenetics, epigenetics and transcriptomics, and explained how each affected the genotype and was then physically manifested. His lecture was by far the easiest to understand because he talked about the specific effects that insults such as excess calories, viruses, etc. had on cancer risk/tumor behavior. I think a lot of people have heard somewhere that excess red meat causes an increase in cholesterol levels and possibly an increased risk of certain cancers, so one of the things I found most interesting about his speech was that that was only true for about 5% of the population. However, there is not yet a way to determine who is at an increased risk of side effects from red meat until after the damage is already done, and because some of the effects are so serious, the entire public is warned of the dangers of red meat. (I also want to mention that Dr. Milner is a member of the Mushroom Research Board, because that just sounds really cool.)

The final lecture was "Maternal Nutrition and Programming of Fetal Development," by Thomas E. Spencer, Ph.D., from Texas A&M University. He talked about the effects of stressors during pregnancy during critical development periods--specifically inadequate nutrition--and how they can cause lifelong complications in the offspring, even if the stressors are only present for a short time. He focused on problems that were a result of genetic changes in the offspring of stressed mothers, and noted that those changes would be present in each successive generation as well (which makes it even more important to ensure good maternal nutrition/health and to identify therapies to ameliorate the negative consequences of developmental programming).