Milk at the Intersection of Genomics and Nutrition: Managing the Knowledge

The biological knowledge emerging from genomics sciences is providing unprecedented scrutiny of biological processes, health and disease. Varying susceptibilities to diet-responsive diseases are being assigned to genotypes, age, lifestyle, even their previous diet and lifestyle histories. Health in response to varying foods and diets is being defined in highly quantitative, comprehensive, and immediate terms. The sequences of whole genomes and the parallel developments in comprehensive analytics technologies brings a new opportunity to take a rational approach toward not only the discovery of new food ingredients but also to discovery of as yet unrecognized benefits by which diet influences health. Optimizing health through dietary ingredients will need a different genetic model than plants evolving to avoid being consumed. To build an unprecedented understanding of the mechanisms by which diet can affect metabolic processes will need a genetic model of diet selected through evolution for improving health—milk. Milk is providing unprecedented insights into not just how to make foods safer, but how to make consumers safer. Managing the multiple datasets of milk using the modern tools of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, glycomics, and their functional annotation is the goal of the Knowledge portal of the Milk Genomics Consortium. Is it now time to include a physical repository for milks of various mammals under defined conditions as well?