Microbial Community Dynamics in Mother's Milk and Infant's Mouth and Gut in Moderately Preterm Infants.

ABSTRACT: Mother's own milk represents the optimal source for preterm infant nutrition, as it promotes immune defenses and gastrointestinal function, protects against necrotizing enterocolitis, improves long-term clinical outcome and is hypothesized to drive gut microbiota assembly. Preterm infants at birth usually do not receive their mother's milk directly from the breast, because active suckling and coordination between suckling, swallowing and breathing do not develop until 32-34 weeks gestational age, but actual breastfeeding is usually possible as they grow older. Here, we enrolled moderately preterm infants (gestational age 32-34 weeks) to longitudinally characterize mothers' milk and infants' gut and oral microbiomes, up to more than 200 days after birth, through 16S rRNA sequencing. This pe

SUBMITTER: Biagi E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6204356 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature