Location: Obesity and Metabolism Research
Project Number: 2032-10700-003-027-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2025
End Date: Apr 30, 2026
Objective:
The objective of this Non Assistance Cooperative Agreement is to facilitate the joint conduct of human milk research between the Cooperator and the USDA, Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Western Human Nutrition Research Center (WHNRC), located on the campus of the Cooperator. The joint objective will be to model multi-omic predictors of milk nutrient composition and volume, infant nutritional status, and growth.
Approach:
A multi-omic analysis will be conducted on the omic data available on MILQ participants. This includes milk HMOs and proteomics, milk metabolomics and genomics; fecal 16S rRNA (but some taxonomy pending); transcriptome in 260 samples of milk cells; and sequence data on shotgun metagenomics for 1264 maternal and infant samples. This multi-omic analysis will use a non-hypothesis, data-driven machine-learning approach to determine the important predictors and interactions between predictors that drive infant growth, including human milk content of nutrients and other components and milk volume.