Saroja Voruganti
· ProfessorUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Nutrition
Active 2007–2023
About
Saroja Voruganti, PhD, is a Professor of Nutrition at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, working on building a nationally and internationally recognized research program in nutritional genomics. Her research focuses on identifying genetic susceptibility to diseases, understanding the effect of genetic variation on nutrient metabolism, and exploring how nutrients influence gene expression. She has extensively investigated the interplay between nutritional and genetic factors affecting disease risk in ethnically diverse populations, including American Indian, Alaska Native, Parsi Zoroastrian, and Hispanic populations. Her key research areas include gene-nutrient interactions affecting purine metabolism and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as genetic and environmental factors influencing complex diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Dr. Voruganti joined UNC in 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. She has published extensively, with numerous articles in top-tier journals, and serves as an Associate Editor for prominent genetics and nutrition journals. She teaches graduate courses in Nutrigenetics and Nutrigenomics and conducts workshops on personalized nutrition. Additionally, she is the co-Director of the Precision Nutrition Core at the Nutrition Obesity Research Center, where she works to support nutrigenomic research and facilitate understanding of how lifestyle and genetic interactions impact health and disease.
Research topics
- Developmental psychology
- Demography
- Biology
- Internal medicine
- Biochemistry
- Molecular biology
- Pediatrics
- Psychology
- Environmental health
- Medicine
- Chemistry
Selected publications
Research gaps and opportunities in precision nutrition: an NIH workshop report
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition · 2022 · 91 citations
- Political Science
- Gerontology
- Psychology
Infant Growth Trajectories and Lipid Levels in Adolescence: Evidence From a Chilean Infancy Cohort
American Journal of Epidemiology · 2022 · 3 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Medicine
- Pediatrics
- Demography
Growth in early infancy is hypothesized to affect chronic disease risk factors later in life. To date, most reports draw on European-ancestry cohorts with few repeated observations in early infancy. We investigated the association between infant growth before 6 months and lipid levels in adolescents in a Hispanic/Latino cohort. We characterized infant growth from birth to 5 months in male (n = 311) and female (n = 285) infants from the Santiago Longitudinal Study (1991-1996) using 3 metrics: weight (kg), length (cm), and weight-for-length (g/cm). Superimposition by translation and rotation (SITAR) and latent growth mixture models (LGMMs) were used to estimate the association between infant growth characteristics and lipid levels at age 17 years. We found a positive relationship between the SITAR length velocity parameter before 6 months of age and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in adolescence (11.5, 95% confidence interval; 3.4, 19.5), indicating higher high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels occurring with faster length growth. The strongest associations from the LGMMs were between higher low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and slower weight-for-length growth, following a pattern of associations between slower growth and adverse lipid profiles. Further research in this window of time can confirm the association between early infant growth as an exposure and adolescent cardiovascular disease risk factors.
Current Developments in Nutrition · 2020 · 2 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Biochemistry
- Chemistry
- Molecular biology
Uric acid is the final product of purine metabolism. The role of uric acid in oxidative stress is not clear. Studies have shown uric acid as antioxidant as well as pro-oxidant. High fructose sugar consumption increases uric acid levels by ATP depletion and the subsequent formation AMP which is a uric acid precursor. In our study, we investigated the effect of dose dependent treatments of fructose, uric acid, or a combination of both uric acid and fructose on expression of oxidative stress-related genes, mainly NADPH oxidase 4 (NOX4), superoxide dismutase 3 (SOD3), Forkhead Box O3 (FOXO3) and xanthine dehydrogenase (XDH) in cultured Hep G2 cells. Human hepatocellular carcinoma [HEPG2] (ATCC HB8065) cells were treated with serum-free medium containing either 10 mM fructose, soluble uric acid (0.25 mM, 0.5 mM, or 0.75 mM), or a combination of fructose and uric acid. The cells were collected at the end of each incubation period (30 min, 2 and 24 hours) to extract total RNA. cDNA was synthesized from the extracted RNA. TaqMan assays were designed for use on real-rime PCR platform (QuantStudio 12 K Flex). TaqMan open array primers were custom-made by Thermo Fisher Scientific. Target quantification values were normalized against GAPDH levels and a combination of students’ t-test and ANOVA were applied. Soluble uric acid, either by itself or in conjunction with fructose, did not change the expression of the tested genes at 30 minutes or 2 hours. However, after 24 hours of incubation, uric acid increased the expression of NOX4 by 2 and FOXO3 by 1.5-fold (p < 0.05) whereas uric acid plus fructose-containing media increased the expression of NOX4 by 3.5 and FOXO3 by 2-fold (p < 0.05) after 24 hours of incubation as compared to control. No treatment differences were observed in the expression of SOD3. These findings demonstrate that fructose increases the expression of uric acid-induced oxidative stress related genes. None.
Frequent coauthors
- 26 shared
Kari E. North
- 24 shared
Ann Von Holle
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
- 24 shared
Annie Green Howard
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- 22 shared
Anne E. Justice
Geisinger Health System
- 20 shared
Estela Blanco
Universidad Mayor
- 20 shared
Raquel Burrows
Hospital Luis Calvo Mackenna
- 20 shared
Sheila Gahagan
University of California, San Diego
- 20 shared
Betsy Lozoff
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
Awards & honors
- Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA)
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