| Editorial |
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| Molecular nutrition: basic understanding of the digestion, absorption, and metabolism of nutrients |
| Xiang-hua Yan |
| College of Animal Sciences and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China |
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Abstract Molecular nutrition has emerged as a new area in nutritional science following both advances in mo-lecular biology and requirements for explaining the organism鈥檚 responses to nutrients at a molecular level. These include gene expression, signal transduction, and covalent modifications of proteins (M眉ller and Kersten, 2003). Jacob and Monod (1961) first de-veloped the lactose operon theory, which is the first example of gene regulation by a nutrient. Shapiro et al. (1969) isolated pure lactose operon DNA from Escherichia coli, thereby fully demonstrating the lactose operon model of Jacob and Monod (1961). Gene-nutrient interactions are the paradigm for the interplay between the genome and the environment. Every nutritional process relies on the interplay of a large number of proteins encoded by mRNA mole-cules that are expressed in a given cell. Alterations of mRNA levels and in turn of the corresponding protein levels (although the two variables do not necessarily change in parallel) are critical parameters in control-ling the flux of a nutrient or metabolite through a biochemical pathway. Thus, molecular nutrition helped address fundamental questions of health and provided exquisite mechanistic explanations of the cause and effect.
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Published: 08 June 2015
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