The Second Bruce Ames International Symposium on

Nutritional Genomics

University of California, Davis, Davis California

October 12-14, 2007

Call for Poster and Abstract Submission

The NCMHD Center of Excellence in Nutritional Genomics welcomes your participation in this year’s symposium. To facilitate information sharing, you are encouraged to submit Poster Presentations and Abstracts.

The deadline for submitting posters is Friday, October 12, 2007. For posters submitted for the Bruce Ames Young Investigator Award, the deadline is Monday October 1, 2007. Poster display boards will be available. Posters should include the following elements:

  • Project title
  • Investigators name and institutional address
  • Photo of the PI (optional)
  • Introduction stating the nature of the problem or question, materials and methods, results, conclusion and relevant references.

If you wish to mail your poster ahead of the symposium, please mail it to:

Ms. Yolanda Cortez

Center of Excellence in Nutritional Genomics University of California

Plant Reproductive Biology Building

Extension Center Drive

Davis, CA. 95616

The deadline for submitting abstracts is Monday, October 1, 2007. Abstracts should not exceed 350 words and should be prepared in 12 point Arial font (see Sample Abstract below). Abstracts should be sent electronically to:

Dr. Jim Kaput at <>

(Sample Abstract)

Genomic Transduction and the Diet Gene Paradox: Implications for Nutritional Genomics. R. L. Rodriguez, A. Galvez and K. Dawson. NCMHD Center of Excellence in Nutritional Genomics and Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis California 95616

The mechanisms by which the nutritive (and non-nutritive) constituents of diet influence health and disease outcomes are not well understood. The goal of nutritional genomics is to identify those positive and negative interactions between the constituents of diet and genetic determinants of health and disease they interact with. The challenge for today’s researcher is to reconcile the diverse properties of dietary metabolites with our current understanding of how gene activity is controlled in a comprehensive and highly coordinated fashion. The difficulty with integrating the diverse properties of dietary metabolites with the genetic control needed to impact complex physiological processes is that most dietary metabolites lack the potency and efficacy of drugs (i.e., weak affinity, low specificity, poor pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties). How do low potency dietary metabolites (i.e., low tissue concentration and weak affinity for receptors and enzymes) coordinately regulate thousands of genes in hundreds of pathways to promote health or increase disease risk? Are diet x gene interactions merely the result of random interactions between all possible dietary metabolites and all possible gene products? Finally, why do some individuals respond differently to the same dietary stimuli? These seemingly contradictory observations can be described as the “diet-gene paradox.” In an effort to resolve the paradoxical properties of health-promoting dietary bioactives, we are investigating the chromatin remodeling properties of “lunasin” — a small peptide found in soy. Epidemiological studies have shown that diets rich in soy are associated with lower cancer mortality rates, particularly for cancers of the colon, breast and prostate. Little is known, however, about the molecular basis for these chemopreventive affects. Microarray and chromatin binding studies suggest that lunasin “preps” the human genome for the expression of chemopreventive gene networks by epigenetic modification of histones. Because the properties of lunasin have the potential to activate biological networks in a coordinated and locus-specific fashion, we believe lunasin’s action represents one of a small number of genetic regulatory motifs that we call “genomic transduction.” The implications of genomic transduction for reconciling the diet-gene paradox will be discussed.