Seminar: "EAB Seminar: 'Dietary Lipids as Modulators of Gut Microbiome Function'" - Elizabeth Johnson, PhD

Dietary lipids are a main source of energy for infants and serve as the building blocks of important chemical signals needed for early-life development. One understudied effect of infant lipid consumption is its modulation of gut microbiome function. Lipids from human milk have the potential to affect infant health through their conversion to bioactive signaling molecules by the gut microbiome. Many of these dietary lipids are missing from infant formulas, which could have unrealized consequences for microbiome function and the microbiome’s influence on infant development. In this talk, I will discuss our novel chemical biology-based workflow for identifying uncharacterized diet-dependent microbiome-derived metabolites. Using this approach, we define important lipidmicrobe interactions and determine how lipid supplementation in the NICU affects the gut microbiome of preterm infants. This seminar features speaker  Elizabeth Johnson, PhD, an Associate Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University.