Descripción del proyecto
Estudio de la asociación entre la persistencia de la lactasa y la presencia de microorganismos en cultivos lácteos
El origen y el papel de la producción láctea en las primeras sociedades humanas no se conocen a la perfección. Pocas poblaciones humanas pueden digerir la lactosa de la leche hasta la edad adulta (persistencia de la lactasa o PL), mientras que la mayoría de los humanos adultos tienen una capacidad reducida para digerirla. La PL se ha considerado un ejemplo clásico de coevolución genético-cultural. Sin embargo, la asociación entre los fenotipos de la PL y la intolerancia a la lactosa es variable, y cada vez hay más pruebas que apuntan al papel de los microorganismos en las economías lácteas prehistóricas. El equipo del proyecto DAIRYCULTURES, financiado con fondos europeos, se centrará en Mongolia, un país cuya dieta se compone en gran medida de productos lácteos, para aplicar técnicas genómicas innovadoras a fin de determinar los orígenes del ganado lechero del país y poner a prueba las hipótesis relativas a la conexión entre el microbioma intestinal, la digestión de la lactosa y los genotipos de la PL.
Objetivo
Summary: Dairy products are nutritional resources of global economic importance, and their emergence in prehistory marks a major shift in human dietary ecology. However, basic questions regarding the origins and role of dairying in early human societies remain poorly understood. It is now known that adult hypolactasia (the inability to digest milk sugar) is an ancestral human trait, and that relatively few human populations have genetic variants that allow continued milk digestion into adulthood, a trait known as lactase persistence (LP). The rise of LP has been regarded as a classic example of gene-culture evolution; however, the association between LP and lactose intolerance phenotypes is variable, and LP genotypes do not consistently appear in the archaeological record until more than 5,000 years after the origins of dairying. This has left archaeologists with a puzzling problem, a “milk paradox” regarding how and why ancient peoples developed milk into a dietary resource, how the Bronze Age steppe migrations contributed to the spread of dairying across Eurasia, and what other factors besides LP may have been involved this process. There is now a growing body of evidence that microbes have played important, yet overlooked, roles in the successful establishment of prehistoric dairying economies. This study seeks to answer fundamental questions about the prehistory of dairying by focusing on Mongolia, a country where as much as 80% of the rural diet derives from dairy products, and where dairying has been practiced for more than 3,500 years. Specifically, cutting-edge genomics techniques will be used to identify the origins of Mongolian dairy livestock, proteomics techniques will be used to refine methods for detecting milk proteins in archaeological Mongolian dental calculus, and metagenomics techniques will be used to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between the gut microbiome, lactose digestion, and LP genotypes in nomadic Mongolian dairy herders.
Ámbito científico
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryprehistory
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsproteomics
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedairy
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesnutrition
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
80539 Munchen
Alemania