Infographic: Cook Up an Exome-Based Diet

See how scientists designed food with amino acid compositions based on protein-coding regions in the genomes of mice and fruit flies.

Written byRuth Williams

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To generate diets with species-specific proportions of amino acids, first sequence all the protein-coding regions (the exome) from an organism’s genome and determine the precise proportion of each of the 20 encoded amino acids (five of the 20 are shown as colored codons in DNA, with their respective abundances displayed in the bar chart). Next, mix amino acids at this exact ratio with other nutrients (carbohydrates, lipids, and so on) and serve. Animals on this exome-matched diet will grow larger than those on equivalent diets that have discordant amino acid compositions.

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Meet the Author

Ruth Williams
Ruth is a freelance journalist. Before freelancing, Ruth was a news editor for the Journal of Cell Biology in New York and an assistant editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. Prior to that, she was a bona fide pipette-wielding, test tube–shaking, lab coat–shirking research scientist. She has a PhD in genetics from King’s College London, and was a postdoc in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Today she lives and writes in Connecticut.
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