Foundational studies for precision nutrition

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PROJECT SUMMARY The incidence of cardiometabolic disease has soared during last half-century despite national efforts to improve health through universal dietary recommendations. A critical limitation of this approach is the lack of consideration given to dietary response differences based on an individual’s genetics, which is essential for the nascent field of precision nutrition. The long-term goal of this proposal is to develop the foundation and an experimental platform to support in-depth biological analyses of precision nutrition interventions. The objective of this proposal is to develop an experimental genetic reference platform that models human genetic diversity into a model for precision nutrition. Although largely relying on a discovery-driven approach, the central hypothesis is that a major failing of public health efforts has been generalization of dietary recommendations and that through matching dietary recommendations to an individual’s metabolic needs, cardiovascular health will be greatly improved at the individual and population level. This hypothesis is based on published and unpublished work. The rationale is that completion of these studies will identify genetic and metabolic factors and high-level mechanisms by which diet influences differential cardiometabolic health that can be used to develop new paradigms for precision nutrition. The proposed work will also provide a repository of data and samples from the Collaborative Cross, a publicly available mouse genetic reference population. The central hypothesis will be tested by pursuing three aims: 1) Identify cardiometabolic health traits that are influenced by gene-by-diet (GxD) interactions; 2) Determine the genetic architecture regulating diet-dependent effects on cardiometabolic health; and 3) Validate a precision nutrition paradigm to predict effects of diet on cardiometabolic disease. These aims will be pursued using an innovative combination of a novel, publicly available mouse genetic reference population and human relevant diets for which substantial epidemiological data exists on their cardiometabolic effects. The proposed research is significant because it will determine the health impact that individual genetic variation has on response to common diets and identify those characteristics that are influenced by GxD interactions. It is also significant because it will provide a public database of physiological responses and a sample repository of tissues for future molecular analyses, providing a critical foundation for the nascent field of precision nutrition. The expected outcome of this project is a comprehensive understanding of how diet influences cardiometabolic health in an experimental genetic reference population, an essential first step to support future projects in precision nutrition. The resulting data will have an important positive impact because it will provide a paradigm shift toward precision nutrition by: a) identifying cardiometabolic phenotypes influenced by GxD responses; b) elucidating the genetic architecture and high-level mechanisms of unique responses to diet; c) validating putative diet responses through confirmatory studies; and d) generating a rich database of GxD responses and a sample repository for use by the research community.