Career and Professional Development

Cellular and Physiological Nutrition/Metabolism

Clinical and Translational Nutrition

Next-Generation Standard Reference Diets: Building Nutritional Rigor and Relevance Using Replicable Diet Formulations in Animal Models of Human Disease

Chair(s)

• 

  Sarah Booth, PhD

  Senior Scientist
  Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Tufts University
  Tufts University
  Boston, Massachusetts, United States

  Disclosure(s): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
• 

  Stephen Watts, PhD

  Professor
  Department of Biology
  University of Alabama Birmingham
  Birmingham, Alabama, United States

  Disclosure(s): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

Nutrition is a critical but often underreported variable in laboratory animal research, contributing to challenges in rigor, reproducibility, and translation to human health. This session introduces LANTERN, a collaborative initiative to develop standardized laboratory animal diets, universal dietary identifiers, and a nutrition registry to improve research quality and maximize the value of biomedical data. We'll explore how these efforts, combined with advances in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, can strengthen confidence in preclinical findings and support more reproducible, translatable nutrition science.