Mamels life animal

This week is the  ADSA-AMPA-ASAS-CSAS-WSASAS Joint Annual Meeting  in Phoenix, AZ. Yeah that's right, its JULY and I'm heading to a conference in Phoenix. Woo. Hoo. I guess that's kind of appropriate though since mammary glands evolved from sweating... There are tons of presentations on dairy science- from animal to consumer, but the Lactation Biology Symposium on Wednesday afternoon will be off the hook! Just sayin'- The Long-Term Impact of Epigenetics and Maternal Influence on the Neonate  Through Milk-Borne Factors & Nutrient Status Chair: Michael Van Amburgh, Cornell University Sponsor: EAAP 2:00 PM Introductions.  M. Van Amburgh, Cornell University . 2:05 PM EAAP-ASAS Speaker Exchange Presentation: Role of colostrum and colostrum components on glucose metabolism  in neonatal calves.  H. M. Hammon*, Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), Dummerstorf, Germany . 2:40 PM Nutrition of the dam affects mammary gland development and milk production in the off

Milk is everywhere. From the dairy aisle at the grocery store to the explosive cover of the Mother’s Day issue of Time magazine , the ubiquity of milk makes it easy to take for granted. But surprisingly, milk synthesis is evolutionarily older than mammals. Milk is even older than dinosaurs. Moreover, milk contains constituents that infants don’t digest, namely oligosaccharides, which are the preferred diet of the neonate’s intestinal bacteria ( nom nom nom! )  And milk doesn’t just feed the infant, and the infant’s microbiome; the symbiotic bacteria are IN mother’s milk. Evolutionary Origins of Lactation The fossil record, unfortunately, leaves little direct evidence of the soft-tissue structures that first secreted milk. Despite this, paleontologists can scrutinize morphological features of fossils, such as the presence or absence of milk teeth ( diphyodonty ), to infer clues about the emergence of “milk.” Genome-wide surveys of the expression and function of mammary genes across dive

In January of this year Peggy Neville, Jim McManaman, and Steve Anderson organized and hosted a small conference “designed to bring together a number of different folks in the areas of lactation, breastfeeding, milk, and neonatal nutrition to try to define the critical research questions in these fields.”  During those three unusually balmy days in Denver, Colorado we discussed not just our research programs and findings to date, but explicitly identified unresolved questions in lactation biology and established future goals for research.   The outcome of those discussions was synthesized in a paper out this week from the Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia entitled “ Lactation and NeonatalNutrition: Defining and Refining the Critical Questions ”. And best of all that paper is open access!  In this paper we discuss the current state of knowledge, reviewing a substantial amount of the lactation biology literature. From that foundational framing, we identify the next steps in