The Milk Genome: Education Tool and Hypothesis Machine

There has probably always been a fascination in achieving better health through diet, particularly for students embarking on a career in scientific research. However, scientific strategies for assessing the health of a given individual and matching that health status to specific food compositions for individuals to follow in order to improve specifics of their health do not yet exist. The knowledge emerging from various fields of life science document that populations are made up of individuals with large differences in metabolism, genetic diversity, and lifestyle. However, food appears to be disturbingly far behind. The food strategies that do exist have been discovered empirically, and there is no clear source for their continual discovery and characterization. Where will the next generation of nutrition and food science students find such dietary strategies and bioactive molecules to research? Furthermore, what technical skills will be necessary for these researchers in order to ask such questions?

The recent sequencing of several mammalian genomes, the knowledge that this produced, the new way of addressing molecular evolution and the technologies of genomics have enabled the creation of the milk genome as a research tool, and made it possible for students in food and nutrition to take the most modern research strategies to bear on the problems of diet and health. These tools are already proving to be a unique opportunity for scientists to mine the composition of mammalian milks for bioactive nutrients screened by evolutionary pressure for efficacy. However, there is at the same time the opportunity to use such an investigational strategy to train the next generation of food science and nutrition researchers in disciplines such as bioinformatics, functional genomics, and metabolomics.

This presentation introduces a multidisciplinary UC Davis investigation into the function of milk glycans, resulting from a PhD project taking this new approach to the discovery of milk’s bioactivity. The investigation encompasses functionally annotating the soluble oligosaccharides of human milk, and covers broad ground from the chemical composition, to mammalian and bacterial genomics, to glycobiology. Understanding the function of these molecules, as well as their nutritional targets is a model for how such functions could be built into the next generation of foods, and allow rational improvement of discrete aspects of health.