Milk matters: seeding gut ecosystems and shaping microbiota rivalries.

Maternal milk contains its own diverse microbiome, which has been hypothesized to colonize the infant gut during breastfeeding; however, the dynamics of this process are not well understood, particularly among very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants. A recent study published in by Shama identifies novel dose-dependent relationships between maternal milk microbiota and infant gut microbiota in a cohort of VLBW infants and further explores the potential impact of infant feeding practices and antibiotic use on these microbial colonization dynamics.

Protocol: the International Milk Composition (IMiC) Consortium - a harmonized secondary analysis of human milk from four studies.

Introduction: Human milk (HM) contains a multitude of nutritive and nonnutritive bioactive compounds that support infant growth, immunity and development, yet its complex composition remains poorly understood. Integrating diverse scientific disciplines from nutrition and global health to data science, the International Milk Composition (IMiC) Consortium was established to undertake a comprehensive harmonized analysis of HM from low, middle and high-resource settings to inform novel strategies for supporting maternal-child nutrition and health.

Methods And Analysis: IMiC is a collaboration of HM experts, data scientists and four mother-infant health studies, each contributing a subset of participants: Canada (CHILD Cohort,  = 400), Tanzania (ELICIT Trial,  = 200), Pakistan (VITAL-LW Trial,  = 150), and Burkina Faso (MISAME-3 Trial,  = 290).

Prenatal vitamin C and fish oil supplement use are associated with human milk microbiota composition in the Canadian CHILD Cohort Study.

Maternal diet may modulate human milk microbiota, but the effects of nutritional supplements are unknown. We examined the associations of prenatal diet and supplement use with milk microbiota composition. Mothers reported prenatal diet intake and supplement use using self-administered food frequency and standardised questionnaires, respectively.

Multimodal machine learning for modeling infant head circumference, mothers' milk composition, and their shared environment.

Links between human milk (HM) and infant development are poorly understood and often focus on individual HM components. Here we apply multi-modal predictive machine learning to study HM and head circumference (a proxy for brain development) among 1022 mother-infant dyads of the CHILD Cohort. We integrated HM data (19 oligosaccharides, 28 fatty acids, 3 hormones, 28 chemokines) with maternal and infant demographic, health, dietary and home environment data.

Prevention of COVID-19: Preventive Strategies for General Population, Healthcare Setting, and Various Professions.

The disease 2019 (COVID-19) made a public health emergency in early 2020. Despite attempts for the development of therapeutic modalities, there is no effective treatment yet. Therefore, preventive measures in various settings could help reduce the burden of disease.

Repeatability and reproducibility assessment in a large-scale population-based microbiota study: case study on human milk microbiota.

Background: Quality control including assessment of batch variabilities and confirmation of repeatability and reproducibility are integral component of high throughput omics studies including microbiome research. Batch effects can mask true biological results and/or result in irreproducible conclusions and interpretations. Low biomass samples in microbiome research are prone to reagent contamination; yet, quality control procedures for low biomass samples in large-scale microbiome studies are not well established.

Interrelationships of Fiber-Associated Anaerobic Fungi and Bacterial Communities in the Rumen of Bloated Cattle Grazing Alfalfa.

Frothy bloat is major digestive disorder of cattle grazing alfalfa pastures. Among the many factors identified to contribute to the development of frothy bloat, the disruption of rumen microbiota appears to be of central importance. Anaerobic rumen fungi (ARF) play an important role in sequential breakdown and fermentation of plant polysaccharides and promote the physical disruption of plant cell walls.

Biological observations in microbiota analysis are robust to the choice of 16S rRNA gene sequencing processing algorithm: case study on human milk microbiota.

Background: In recent years, the microbiome field has undergone a shift from clustering-based methods of operational taxonomic unit (OTU) designation based on sequence similarity to denoising algorithms that identify exact amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), and methods to identify contaminating bacterial DNA sequences from low biomass samples have been developed. Although these methods improve accuracy when analyzing mock communities, their impact on real samples and downstream analysis of biological associations is less clear.

Results: Here, we re-processed our recently published milk microbiota data using Qiime1 to identify OTUs, and Qiime2 to identify ASVs, with or without contaminant removal using decontam.

Breastmilk Feeding Practices Are Associated with the Co-Occurrence of Bacteria in Mothers' Milk and the Infant Gut: the CHILD Cohort Study.

Gut microbiota play a critical role in infant health. It is now accepted that breastmilk contains live bacteria from endogenous and exogenous sources, but it remains unclear whether these bacteria transfer to the infant gut and whether this process is influenced by breastmilk feeding practices. Here, we show that certain bacteria, including Streptococcus spp.

Human milk fungi: environmental determinants and inter-kingdom associations with milk bacteria in the CHILD Cohort Study.

Background: Fungi constitute an important yet frequently neglected component of the human microbiota with a possible role in health and disease. Fungi and bacteria colonise the infant gastrointestinal tract in parallel, yet most infant microbiome studies have ignored fungi. Milk is a source of diverse and viable bacteria, but few studies have assessed the diversity of fungi in human milk.

Invited review: Microbiota of the bovine udder: Contributing factors and potential implications for udder health and mastitis susceptibility.

Various body sites of vertebrates provide stable and nutrient-rich ecosystems for a diverse range of commensal, opportunistic, and pathogenic microorganisms to thrive. The collective genomes of these microbial symbionts (the microbiome) provide host animals with several advantages, including metabolism of indigestible carbohydrates, biosynthesis of vitamins, and modulation of innate and adaptive immune systems. In the context of the bovine udder, however, the relationship between cow and microbes has been traditionally viewed strictly from the perspective of host-pathogen interactions, with intramammary infections by mastitis pathogens triggering inflammatory responses (i.

The monoamine oxidase-A inhibitor clorgyline promotes a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition in the MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell line.

Monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) dysfunction has been historically associated with depression. Recently, depression as well as altered MAO-A expression have both been associated with a poor prognosis in cancers, although the mechanism involved remains ambiguous. For example, MAO-A mRNA is repressed across cancers, yet MAO-A protein and levels of serotonin, a substrate of MAO-A implicated in depression, are paradoxically increased in malignancies, including breast cancer.

Knowledge and use of folic acid in women of reproductive age.

Folic acid reduces the risk of neural tube defects. As approximately 50% of pregnancies are unintended, women of reproductive age should be aware of the importance of folic acid. We reviewed the existing literature on these women's knowledge of folic acid and neural tube defects.