Our daily diet is more than a collection of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins, minerals and vitamins that provide energy and serve as building blocks of our life, it is also the most dominant environmental signal to which we are exposed from womb to death. The regulation of metabolism is a key aspect of life and majorly driven by nutrients. In particular, the genome-wide aspects of the daily communication between our diet and our genome are a central topic of nutrigenomics. It is a lifelong process starting at conception and ending with death, which modulates gene expression in metabolic organs, such as in adipose tissue, skeletal muscle, liver and pancreas, but also in the brain and the immune system. Thus, for understanding the diet-(epi)genome communication one needs to take a whole body´s perspective.
Molecular understanding of the regulation of energy metabolism by various environmental signals is essential, in order to evaluate their relative contribution and possible synergistic or antagonistic effects.
The Research Topic will summarize knowledge how nutritional molecules, such as micro- and macronutrients as well as secondary metabolites, will have an effect on the regulation of metabolism. Hereby we will focus on effects involving the genome and gene regulation like the modulation of the activity of transcription factors, such as nuclear receptors and FOXO proteins, and chromatin modifiers. A molecular insight on the interference of different signal transduction pathways will provide a molecular basis for understanding the synergistic and antagonistic effects of various environmental signals on metabolic diseases.
Our daily diet is more than a collection of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins, minerals and vitamins that provide energy and serve as building blocks of our life, it is also the most dominant environmental signal to which we are exposed from womb to death. The regulation of metabolism is a key aspect of life and majorly driven by nutrients. In particular, the genome-wide aspects of the daily communication between our diet and our genome are a central topic of nutrigenomics. It is a lifelong process starting at conception and ending with death, which modulates gene expression in metabolic organs, such as in adipose tissue, skeletal muscle, liver and pancreas, but also in the brain and the immune system. Thus, for understanding the diet-(epi)genome communication one needs to take a whole body´s perspective.
Molecular understanding of the regulation of energy metabolism by various environmental signals is essential, in order to evaluate their relative contribution and possible synergistic or antagonistic effects.
The Research Topic will summarize knowledge how nutritional molecules, such as micro- and macronutrients as well as secondary metabolites, will have an effect on the regulation of metabolism. Hereby we will focus on effects involving the genome and gene regulation like the modulation of the activity of transcription factors, such as nuclear receptors and FOXO proteins, and chromatin modifiers. A molecular insight on the interference of different signal transduction pathways will provide a molecular basis for understanding the synergistic and antagonistic effects of various environmental signals on metabolic diseases.