Research Interests

Nutritional genomics is the study of diet-gene interactions on a whole genome scale with the goal of developing innovative solutions to disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. There are a few already known well-characterized examples of diet-gene interactions affecting human health: e.g., lactose intolerance, phenylketonuria, galatosemia, gluten-sensitive enteropathy, and familial hypercholesterolemia. In these classic examples, disease-specific genetic polymorphisms are identified, their population distributions are known, and clinical dietary guidelines are developed for disease prevention and treatment. In addition to these disease conditions, many common chronic diseases: e.g., obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and prostate cancer, are also associated with diet as a risk or course-modifying factor. However, the genetic background of these polygenic diseases is more complex and the mechanistic explanations of the diet-gene interactions could become possible only with the recent advances in post-genomic (omic) technologies. The chemopreventive properties of a soy-based polypeptide is being investigated using microarray analysis of human cells and small animal models. This peptide has been shown to remodel chromatin structure and to up-regulate genes related to tumor suppression, apoptosis, cell cycle control and DNA repair.