Oct 4, 2026 · Under review at npj Science of Food
Integrated omics reveals actionable drivers of bioactive variation in US milk
Cheng-En Tan, Mariana Barboza, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Shanghyeon Kim, Lukas Maximilian Masopust, Ivor Prado, Muhammad Adil Salim, Fangzhou Li, George Berdovskiy, Ilias Apostolakos, Brandon Invergo, Karen M. Kalanetra, Danielle G. Lemay, David A. Mills, Armin Oloumi, Cheng-Yu Weng, Carlito B. Lebrilla, Xuan He, Carolyn Slupsky, Oliver Fiehn, Ibuki Kusumoto, Ameer Y. Taha, Yu Wang, Daniela Barile, Alexis Davis, David E. Olson, Justin B. Siegel, Ilias Tagkopoulos
Summary
The study measured 60 retail milk samples from ten US regions in seven ways at once, from genes and RNA to proteins, peptides, fats, sugars and small molecules. It identified 6,714 compounds and gave absolute concentrations for 5,288 of them, most of which had no such estimate in existing milk databases. The results are collected in the Dairy Molecule Database, a public web resource.
Of 54 peptides predicted by computer to fight bacteria, 35 were active in the lab, six of them strongly, against A. baumannii, a drug-resistant hospital pathogen. Differences in bioactivity tracked purchase region, breed and certain gene variants, which suggests that breeding and supply-chain choices could raise the health value of commercial milk.