June 1, 2017 • It’s high time we covered acetylcholine — the most plentiful neurotransmitter in the body. And our Know Your Neurotransmitters series continues with the best guest possible to talk to us about acetylcholine: Dr. Steven Zeisel, MD, PhD. Dr. Zeisel, UNC Nutrition Research Institute Director, was involved in the first study of the effects of choline — the nutrient precursor to acetylcholine — on humans […]
May 1, 2017 • Many of the genes we study at the NRI are involved in nutrient metabolism. One of the ways we can learn about what a gene does is to delete it in an animal model and then see how the gene-deleted animals differ from normal animals. By observing how disruption of a gene affects an animal’s growth, development, and health, we can develop insights into […]
November 30, 2016 • Susan Sumner, PhD joins the UNC Nutrition Research Institute (NRI) on December 1, 2016, as a Professor of metabolomicsNutrition. Dr. Sumner is working to make personalized medicine a reality through metabolomics. Metabolomics involves measuring thousands of metabolites in cells, tissues, and biological fluids.
November 1, 2016 • Though it’s present in a variety of foods and an essential part of a person’s diet, many people may not have heard of the nutrient choline.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Nutrition Research Institute, located at the NC Research Campus in Kannapolis, have studied the impact that diets lacking in choline could have on everything from liver and muscle tissue to brain development.
October 25, 2016 • Several recent studies linked increased levels of a metabolic product of dietary choline with higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) (Wang et al., 2011; Tang et al., 2013) through a mechanism that involved gut microbiota-produced trimethylamine oxide (TMAO). These studies have sparked considerable scientific (and non-scientific) discussion, with health advice from some groups suggesting avoidance of meat and eggs (significant sources of choline) and from others suggesting that the findings have been vastly overinterpreted.
September 21, 2016 • Natalia Surzenko, Ph.D., is part of a team of researchers at the UNC-Chapel Hill Nutrition Research Institute (NRI) located on the North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC) in Kannapolis focusing their efforts on brain development. Her current goal is to determine the role of choline as an essential nutrient for development of the cerebral cortex.