Post-genomics growth and puberty

Key words: Children, Growth, Gene expression, Molecular auxology, Interactome

In the last 50 years the surveillance of children’s growth was based upon the adoption of the graphs of percentiles of normal growth: there was no chance to explore the pattern of growth of the individual child, more than declaring his normality/abnormality. Recently, the cluster of gene expression related to three phases of growth (infancy, adolescence and adulthood) has been identified. It may now be possible to monitor the growth of the individual child through the next generation analysis of the profile of gene expression of the single child. This information will offer a precise insight of the metabolic processes that regulate the expression of specific cluster of gene. The direction will be from linear or tridimensional measurements to a multidimensional estimation of the growth “regulome”.