Research

PI: Chiara Damiani,

Co-PI: Elena Carbonin, Padova University

The EmbryoDiet project aims at characterizing the metabolic shifts occurring at the pre-, peri- and post-implantation stages of the human embryo to support the definition of a dietary regimen during pregnancy. We also aim to identify variability in the metabolic requirements of embryos related to sex, motivated by the evidence that in-utero malnutrition seems to be perceived differentially by male and female embryos.

Metabolism is regulated by the complex interaction between the availability of reaction substrates, and the expression level of enzymes, which is controlled at the transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational level, and that indirectly affect the availability of substrates of neighbor reactions in the metabolic network. Hence metabolism cannot be fully understood by analyzing -omics data alone, but only by using innovative multi-omics data integration frameworks rooted in data science and computational systems biology.

To achieve the project aim, we intend to obtain transcriptomics, proteomics, and exo-metabolomics data from embryo-like structures generated from male and female pluripotent stem cells and integrate them into steady-state computational models.
Such a computational approach has already been employed successfully for the prediction of metabolic shifts in mouse embryonic stem cells