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Project Topic
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What is already known? Biomarkers have been established that reflect the intake of specific foods. However, foods are not consumed in isolation but as part of a complex diet. Therefore, the interaction of foods, dietary habits and dietary patterns need to be considered to predict biological and health outcomes. Moreover, energy balance, activity and circadian patterns interact with the systemic effects of dietary components, and hence the effects of dietary intake are related to physical activity, sedentary and sleep behaviour. There is an unmet need to characterise objective quantitative single and combined biomarkers to assess diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep. Most promising are biomarkers that evaluate diet and behaviour in interaction with the body’s metabolic needs, including intermediate and end products of metabolism that can now be measured with sensitive and precise high-performance metabolomics methodology and be analysed with cutting edge bioinformatics tools. What will BiomarKid do? BiomarKid will characterize biomarkers that can identify adherence to dietary patterns, patterns of physical and sedentary activity, and sleep, and the interaction between them, from birth to young adulthood. BiomarKid will capitalize two longitudinal deeply phenotyped cohort studies: CHOP and TOMI (0 to 18y) with 3300 participants. They provide an extremely rich database on dietary intake (based on repeated 3-day dietary records and food frequency questionnaires), objective measures of physical activity, sedentarism and sleep (by computerized accelerometry), biosamples that are already analyzed in part and will be available for further analyses. BiomarKid will use state of the art techniques to determine dietary patterns, quantify biomarkers (metabolomics, proteomics) and sophisticated computer-based techniques to maximize the understanding of the data (machine learning and artificial intelligence). The consortium holds the outstanding multidisciplinary expertise, capabilities and infrastructure to conduct the project. What will BiomarKid add? • Appropriate characterization of biomarkers of comprehensive dietary patterns, the balance between physical activity and sedentary behaviour, sleep habits, and the interplay between them. • BiomarKid will deliver a web-based tool for interpretation of biomarkers of diet and physical activity to end-users from research, clinical and public health settings (computational expertise not required), for future applications on health.
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