Meeting Abstract

S9.2-3  Tuesday, Jan. 7 11:30  A beginner’s guide to nutritional profiling in physiology and ecology FROST , Paul C*; WAGNER, Nicole D; Trent University; Trent University paulfrost@trentu.ca

The nutritional history of an organism is often inherently difficult to ascertain. This information on past diet is particularly important when explaining the role of nutrition in physiological responses and ecological dynamics. One approach to infer the past dietary history of an individual is through characterization of its nutritional phenotype, an interrelated set of genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and physiological properties that are sensitive to dietary stress. Comparisons of nutritional phenotypes between the study organism and reference phenotypes can provide insight into the type and intensity of past dietary constraints. Here we describe the process of using nutritional profiling in ecophysiological research where a suite of molecular responses are cataloged for animals experiencing known types of intensities of dietary stress and are quantitatively compared to those of unknown individuals. We supplement this delineation of the process of nutritional profiling with a first-order analysis of its sensitivity to the number of profiling response variables and their responsiveness to diet, the size of reference populations, and to the influence of confounding environmental and organismal variables.In doing so, we demonstrate the considerable promise this approach has to transform future study nutritional effects in physiology and ecology by providing more and better information on responses to dietary stress in animals and their populations