Translating neonatal microbiome science into commercial innovation: metabolism of human milk oligosaccharides as a basis for probiotic efficacy in breast-fed infants.

ABSTRACT: For over a century, physicians have witnessed a common enrichment of bifidobacteria in the feces of breast-fed infants that was readily associated with infant health status. Recent advances in bacterial genomics, metagenomics, and glycomics have helped explain the nature of this unique enrichment and enabled the tailored use of probiotic supplementation to restore missing bifidobacterial functions in at-risk infants. This review documents a 20-year span of discoveries that set the stage for the current use of human milk oligosaccharide-consuming bifidobacteria to beneficially colonize, modulate, and protect the intestines of at-risk, human milk-fed, neonates. This review also presents a model for probiotic applications wherein bifidobacterial functions, in the form of colonization a

SUBMITTER: Mills DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10075334 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature