353 - From Phlogiston to Chromatin Structure: The Deepening Our Understanding of Animal Energy Use

In the 1660’s when John Mayow made his observations about a candle and a mouse, he could not have imagined the genome-level breakthroughs that occurred in our understanding of metabolism. The trip from the four elements in the world (water, earth, fire and air) to CRISPR CAS 9 gene editing has illustrated the genius of the human mind to solve complex questions and points to amazing opportunities in the future. The development of the calorimeter (1780’s) by Crawford and Lavoisier led to our understanding of metabolism, animal-to-animal variation and ultimately led to the creation of energy partitioning systems. In the 1800’s methods to determine the chemical composition of feeds was being developed which allowed nutrition to become quantitative as well as qualitative. The merger of these lines of research became practical animal feeding. Continual improvement of these systems (NRC and now NASEM) provide frameworks for animal feeding and research questions we continue to ask and answer. Fundamental energetics became bioenergetics and biochemistry as the field progressed. Progress continues on tissue, cellular and subcellular (organelle), levels of energy metabolism. Examination of processes such as organ specific metabolic intensity and growth, ion pumping, mitochondrial uncoupling and membrane lipid composition continues to teach us to understand the energy processes in the animal. In recent times, the expression of regulatory proteins, gene networks and DNA level deletions and mutations are places we look to deepen our understanding of animal physiology and behavior. Current investigations expand our knowledge of epigenetics and chromatin level regulation of the processes animals use to thrive. Each step in our deepening knowledge about genomics and nutrition make our goal of providing all animals with the appropriate nutritional needs for health, productivity and wellbeing attainable.