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Role of Nucleotides in Intestinal Development and Repair: Implications for Infant Nutrition¹

Ricardo Uauy^*,, Richard Quan and Angel Gil^**

^* Instituto de Nutrición y Tecnología de los Alimentos (INTA), University of Chile. Santiago 11, Chile University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, TX 7523-9063 ^** Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Dietary sources of nucleotides may be conditionally essential nutrients. Rapidly growing tissues such as the intestinal epithelium and lymphoid cells lack significant capacity for de novo synthesis of nucleotides and require exogenous sources of purine and pyrimidine bases. Dietary purines are not significantly incorporated into hepatic nucleic acids, but pyrimidines are. Both are taken up by intestinal cells with excess purines converted to uric acid. Nucleotides are important for normal development, maturation and repair of the gastrointestinal tract. Human milk is the best source of nucleotides for young infants because cow's milk is lacking in nucleotide content. It is likely that infant formulas should have sources of nucleotides added to more closely duplicate human milk and provide these substrates for maximal intestinal development and repair.

KEY WORDS: • dietary nucleotides • infant nutrition • intestinal development

¹ Presented as part of the symposium "Dietary Nucleotides: A Recently Demonstrated Requirement for Cellular Development and Immune Function" given at the Experimental Biology '93 meeting, New Orleans, LA, March 31, 1993. This symposium, sponsored by the American Institute of Nutrition and the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, was supported by grants from Mead Johnson Research Center, Ross Laboratories, a division of Abbott Laboratories, Sandoz Nutrition and Wyeth-Ayerst International. Guest editor for this symposium was Frederick B. Rudolph, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, TX.

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