Molecular Evolution of Milk: Computational Genomics as a Discovery Tool

Milk is the sole recipe for the nutrition of a growing infant. Throughout time, the results of milk production have been exposed to relentless Darwinian selective pressure to serve the needs of the infant while minimizing impact on the mother. Thus, elucidation of the ingredients in this recipe should provide us with the most essential promoters of human health. Nutrition scientists are therefore challenged to identify and characterize the molecules present in milk, their genesis, their targets, and their mechanisms of actions. In this study, we use a literature mining tool to extract a library of genes involved in lactation. Literature mining is also leveraged to identify additional candidate milk genes and to categorize them by functional and anatomical clusters. These analyses are discussed in the context of what is known about lactation and new directions of study are explored. Finally, a conceptual framework for future work is presented.