Nutrigenomics in Farm Animals

Abstract

Nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics are new disciplines that study the effects of food at the genetic level. Nutrigenomics studies how bioactive chemicals in foods and supplements affects animal metabolism by altering gene expression and unites many fields: nutrition, bioinformatics, molecular biology, genomics, functional genomics, epidemiology, and epigenomics. The use of multi-disciplinary tools provides new opportunities to investigate the complex interactions of the genome and the diet. These new approaches highlight the relevant role of genetics-nutrition interactions on different physiological and metabolic processes with a high impact on economically relevant traits as meat and milk quality, and the interest of multidisciplinary studies to face these new complex issues. The objective of this mini-review is to discuss the basic concepts, technical terms and technologies involved in Nutrigenomics studies and also to discuss the results of some published works that show how nutrition affects the expression of genes involved in lipid metabolism, oxidative processes and milk production and how nutritional intervention might change meat quality and tissue composition.