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.

中文翻译：

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童年血浆蛋白质组：发现其在公共卫生营养中的应用

数以百万计的儿童患有多种营养缺乏症，威胁着他们的最佳生长、发育和生活质量。从大量扩展的实用生物标志物中揭示营养不良的严重程度和潜在生物学对于制定适当的针对性和评估干预措施至关重要。然而，除了人体测量学和偶尔使用生化指标外，我们揭示和量化多种形式营养不良的能力仍然有限。血浆蛋白质组学有望作为开发新型生物标志物的基础，以促进对人口的生长、微量营养素状况、炎症和其他健康状况的评估，同时还提供对营养不良的原因和不利后果的生物学见解。发现驱动的血浆蛋白质组学已被证明可以揭示营养和健康状况的功能性生物标志物，识别蛋白质生物标志物集群，从中可以开发出现场友好、全面和低成本的方法来评估人群。在这篇简短的综述中，我们总结了迄今为止的几个关键发现，并讨论了基于蛋白质组学的生物标志物在报告低资源环境中营养不良的程度和代谢特征方面的潜在公共卫生应用。