Responses to variation in nutritional environments

充足的营养对生长、繁殖、免疫功能和疾病预防至关重要。然而，环境的变化可能会对确保足够的营养构成挑战。这个项目考察了个人如何在不同的环境中改变消费习惯。个人可能采取的策略包括：食用营养状况相对相似的各种食物，针对特定食物来实现类似的营养摄入量，容忍营养比例不同的饮食，以及依靠肠道中的细菌群落来帮助消化食物。为了了解这些营养策略是如何相互补充的，研究小组调查了经历不同营养环境的有机体的摄食行为、饮食营养成分和肠道细菌。该项目为本科生提供培训机会，包括那些来自STEM代表性不足群体的学生，在一个为少数群体服务的机构建设研究能力，向学术和非学术受众广泛传播成果，并加强跨不同研究领域的多机构合作。这项研究旨在帮助理解生活在不同的生态环境中如何影响养分的摄取和平衡。为了理解这个问题，研究小组调查了野生红尾猴在三种不同的森林中做出营养决定的方式，这些森林的植物成分差异很大。研究问题涉及生态环境如何影响饮食和营养，饮食和营养平衡的灵活性程度，以及饮食和营养的变化如何与微生物组的组成相关。该团队使用了各种方法来解决这些研究问题，包括行为观察、饮食分析和生物信息学微生物组分析。在这样做的过程中，他们帮助破译饮食通用性背后的营养机制，以阐明饮食通才如何跨越时间和空间取得成功。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Adequate nutrition is critical for growth, reproduction, immune function, and prevention of disease. However, variation in environments can pose challenges to securing adequate nutrition. This project examines how individuals shift consumption practices across variable environments. Strategies that individuals may employ range from eating diverse foods with relatively similar nutritional profiles, targeting specific foods to achieve similar nutrient intakes, tolerating diets with disparate nutrient ratios, and relying on bacterial communities in the gut to aid in the digestion of food. To understand how these nutritional strategies complement each other, the research team investigates feeding behavior, diet nutritional compositions and gut bacteria in an organism that experiences disparate nutritional environments. The project offers training opportunities for undergraduate students, including those from under-represented groups in STEM, builds research capacity at a minority-serving institution, disseminates results broadly to academic and non-academic audiences, and strengthens multi-institution collaborations across diverse fields of study. This research aims to contribute to understanding how living in diverse ecological environments affects nutrient intake and balance. To understand this issue, the research team investigates the ways in which wild redtail monkeys make nutritional decisions in three different forests where plant composition varies widely. Research questions address how ecological circumstances affect diet and nutrition, the degree of flexibility in diet and in nutrient balance, and how variation in diet and nutrition correlate with the composition of the microbiome. The team employs a variety of methods to address these research questions, including behavioral observations, dietary analysis, and bioinformatic microbiome analysis. In doing so, they assist in deciphering the nutritional mechanisms behind dietary generalism to shed light on how dietary generalists succeed across time and space.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.