Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Department, Faculty of Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 30;15(1):894. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y.
Breast milk contains human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) that cannot be digested by infants, yet nourish their developing gut microbiome. While Bifidobacterium are the best-known utilizers of individual HMOs, a longitudinal study examining the evolving microbial community at high-resolution coupled with mothers' milk HMO composition is lacking. Here, we developed a high-throughput method to quantify Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis (BL. infantis), a proficient HMO-utilizer, and applied it to a longitudinal cohort consisting of 21 mother-infant dyads. We observed substantial changes in the infant gut microbiome over the course of several months, while the HMO composition in mothers' milk remained relatively stable. Although Bifidobacterium species significantly influenced sample variation, no specific HMOs correlated with Bifidobacterium species abundance. Surprisingly, we found that BL. infantis colonization began late in the breastfeeding period both in our cohort and in other geographic locations, highlighting the importance of focusing on BL. infantis dynamics in the infant gut.
母乳中含有人类乳寡糖（HMOs），婴儿无法消化，但能滋养其正在发育的肠道微生物组。双歧杆菌是最著名的 HMO 利用者，但缺乏对高分辨率纵向研究中不断演变的微生物群落与母亲母乳 HMO 组成的研究。在这里，我们开发了一种高通量方法来定量长双歧杆菌亚种。婴儿双歧杆菌（BL. infantis），一种高效的 HMO 利用者，并将其应用于由 21 对母婴组成的纵向队列中。我们观察到婴儿肠道微生物组在几个月的时间里发生了显著变化，而母亲母乳中的 HMO 组成相对稳定。尽管双歧杆菌属物种显著影响了样本的变异性，但没有特定的 HMO 与双歧杆菌属物种丰度相关。令人惊讶的是，我们发现在我们的队列和其他地理位置，BL. infantis 的定植都发生在母乳喂养后期，这凸显了关注婴儿肠道中 BL. infantis 动态的重要性。
