Investigating the interplay of genes, diet and lifestyle

A new collaboration between the University of Auckland-based Liggins Institute and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI) has received $1.5 million from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment’s Catalyst Project fund to investigate the interplay between genes, diet and lifestyle.

It is hoped that the ‘GENO Project’ will generate discoveries that could lead to treatments and prevention of some of the most serious diet-related health issues facing Australia and New Zealand today.

GENO stands for the New Zealand-Australia LifeCourse Collaboration on Genes, Environment, Nutrition and Obesity. Specific research projects include:

• developing methods to predict how each individual’s DNA sequence contributes to their health and wellbeing and better predict obesity risk and the outcome of targeted interventions;
• an investigation of the critical role of micronutrients (vitamins, essential fatty and amino acids, and minerals) in metabolic health.

The collaboration gives researchers at the Liggins Institute access to a wealth of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), which has followed 10,000 children since 2004. This includes 150,000 blood and other biosamples collected by MCRI’s landmark Child Health CheckPoint project, which also produced an in-depth snapshot of the physical health of nearly 2000 LSAC parent–child pairs when the children were 11–12 years old.

Two National Science Challenges based at the Liggins Institute, ‘A Better Start’ and ‘High Value Nutrition’, will also benefit from the collaboration.

The MCRI, based at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, will benefit from the Liggins Institute’s international leadership in both nutritional systems biology, which uses computer models to illuminate the interplay of genes, diet and lifestyle as well as methods to reveal the ‘genetic architecture’ of health and disease.

GENO will also generate PhD and postdoctoral opportunities that will grow New Zealand and Australia’s future researchers and open up new potential international investment in research in the two countries.