Our recent manuscript has just been published by mSphere from American Society of Microbiology Journals.
Identification of Differentiating Metabolic Pathways between Infant Gut Microbiome Populations Reveals Depletion of Function-Level Adaptation to Human Milk in the Finnish Population
By: Jan Majta, Krzysztof Odrzywolek, Bozena Milanovic, Vladyslav Hubar, Sonia Wrobel, Emilia Strycharz-Angrecka, Szymon Wojciechowski,
Kaja Milanowska
ABSTRACT
A variety of autoimmune and allergy events are becoming increasingly common, especially in Western countries. Some pieces of research link such conditions with the composition of microbiota during infancy. In this period, the predominant form of nutrition for gut microbiota is oligosaccharides from human milk (HMO). A number of gut-colonizing strains, such as Bifidobacterium and Bacteroides, are able to utilize HMO, but only some Bifidobacterium strains have evolved to digest the specific composition of human oligosaccharides. Differences in the proportions of the two genera that are able to utilize HMO have already been associated with the frequency of allergies and autoimmune diseases in the Finnish and the Russian populations. Our results show that differences in terms of the taxonomic annotation do not explain the reason for the differences in the Bifidobacterium/Bacteroides ratio between the Finnish and the Russian populations. In this paper, we present the results of function-level analysis. Unlike the typical workflow for gene abundance analysis, BiomeScout technology explains the differences in the Bifidobacterium/Bacteroides ratio. Our research shows the differences in the abundances of the two enzymes that are crucial for the utilization of short type 1 oligosaccharides.
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