Rainer Gross Award Lecture 2018: The Childhood Plasma Proteome: Discovering its Applications in Public Health Nutrition

Millions of children have multiple nutritional deficiencies, threatening their optimal growth, development, and quality of life. Revealing the magnitude and underlying biology of malnutrition from a greatly expanded set of practical biomarkers will be critical for developing appropriately targeted and evaluated interventions. However, our abilities to reveal and quantify the many forms of malnutrition, other than by anthropometry and occasional use of biochemical indicators, remain limited. Plasma proteomics holds great promise as a basis for developing novel biomarkers to facilitate assessment of growth, micronutrient status, inflammation, and other health status of populations while also providing biological insight into causes and adverse consequences of malnutrition. Discovery-driven plasma proteomics has been shown to reveal functional biomarkers of nutritional and health status, identifying clusters of protein biomarkers from which field-friendly, comprehensive, and low-cost methods could be developed for assessing populations. In this brief review, we summarize several key discoveries to date and discuss potential public health applications of proteomics-based biomarkers in reporting the extent and metabolic features of undernutrition in low-resource settings