Impact of Diet on Growth and Maintenance of Adipocytes, Myocytes and Hepatocytes in Infants

Human breast milk is ideal for growth, nutrition and development of infants. World Health Organization (WHO) recommends, infants should be exclusively breastfed during the first six months of life. Caseation of lactation in mothers, lack of nutrition, improper supply of formula feeds causes malnutrition. Therefore, effective food selection is necessary to combat this disorder. In this study we have designed a pipeline which was deployed to screen 7,38,418 foods; that has similar amino acids concentration profiles with human breast milk obtained from Asian, European and North American subjects. Genome Scale Modelling (GSM) approach was used to understand the impact of 508 selected foods on the insilico growth and maintenance of adipocytes, myocytes and hepatocytes in the infants. The top 10 selected foods from this analysis showed better value in terms of tissue growth and maintenance when compared with traditional foods such as soya flour, baked beans given to infants of malnutrition prone areas. The amino acids constituents such as tryptophan, methionine content of these foods were found to be growth-limiting. We propose several foods that would serve to design cost-effective formula feeds for infants. Further, this toolbox/pipeline could be extensively used to understand diet requirement, selection and design ready-to-use-therapeutic foods (RUTFs) for malnourished infants.

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