The National Institutes of Health has awarded Xuan Zhuang, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas, about $2 million to study how genes and the environment work together to impact health, the university announced Tuesday.
Of specific interest to Zhuang is how differences in genetic background can influence susceptibility to metabolic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes, through differences in diet.
“Every person’s traits — like his or her metabolism or susceptibility to disease — are shaped by a mix of genes and the environment,” Zhuang said in a news release. “Some genetic differences don’t show an effect under normal conditions, but when the environment changes, their impact becomes clear. By understanding these hidden genetic effects, we can better understand disease risk and resilience.”
Zhuang’s research could uncover hidden genetic variation, unknown gene-trait connections and gene-environment interactions, ultimately improving our understanding of complex diseases and paving the way for more approaches to precise medicine.
Zhuang will use fruit flies as a model species to study these interactions, the release said. They will be fed different diets, such as high sugar or high fat, to study how genes interact with dietary changes to influence traits related to metabolism, development and physiology.
The goal is to identify and map out candidate genes that play an outsized role in disease-related traits response to differences in diet.
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