Infant Health

The first 1,000 days of life are critical for shaping a child's lifelong health, and the infant gut microbiome plays a central role in this process. At birth, an infant's gut is colonized by microorganisms that influence digestion, immune development, and even responses to vaccinations. The method of delivery (vaginal birth or cesarean section) and early nutrition choices, such as breastfeeding or formula feeding, significantly affect the infant's microbial composition.

Infant Health

The first 1,000 days of life are critical for shaping a child's lifelong health, and the infant gut microbiome plays a central role in this process. At birth, an infant's gut is colonized by microorganisms that influence digestion, immune development, and even responses to vaccinations. The method of delivery (vaginal birth or cesarean section) and early nutrition choices, such as breastfeeding or formula feeding, significantly affect the infant's microbial composition.

Our Expertise in Infant Gut Microbiome Research

At Cmbio, we support both academic and industrial clients in uncovering the complexities of the infant gut microbiome. We provide insights into how nutritional interventions, such as prebiotics (Human Milk Oligosaccharides) and probiotics, influence microbial colonization and function.

Our custom-developed analysis tools, showcased in publications co-authored with our clients (1-6), can assess how interventions like probiotics or HMOs in formula shift the microbiome. This approach includes clonal-level resolution profiling to differentiate between probiotic strains and naturally occurring strains in the infant gut.

 

Services for Infant Gut Microbiome Studies

We offer advanced multi-omics services to help you explore the infant microbiome at multiple levels. Our capabilities include:

  • Shotgun metagenomics and marker gene analysis for deep microbial profiling.

  • Metabolomics to analyze key metabolites like HMOs, short-chain fatty acids, and tryptophan metabolites, which are critical for gut health and development.

  • Functional profiling to understand how specific species utilize HMOs and how these metabolic pathways influence infant health.

  • Strain tracking and engraftment to distinguish between probiotic and endogenous strains and examine strain-level differences.

  • Infant fecal community typing and microbiome age prediction to analyze shifts in microbiome and infant development

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References

  1. Bosheva M, Tokodi I, Krasnow A, Pedersen HK, Lukjancenko O, Eklund AC, Grathwohl D, Sprenger N, Berger B, Cercamondi CI; 5 HMO Study Investigator Consortium. Infant Formula With a Specific Blend of Five Human Milk Oligosaccharides Drives the Gut Microbiota Development and Improves Gut Maturation Markers: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Front Nutr. 2022 Jul 6;9:920362. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2022.920362. PMID: 35873420; PMCID: PMC9298649.
  2. Holst AQ, Myers P, Rodríguez-García P, Hermes GDA, Melsaether C, Baker A, Jensen SR, Parschat K. Infant Formula Supplemented with Five Human Milk Oligosaccharides Shifts the Fecal Microbiome of Formula-Fed Infants Closer to That of Breastfed Infants. Nutrients. 2023 Jul 10;15(14):3087. doi: 10.3390/nu15143087. PMID: 37513505; PMCID: PMC10383262.
  3. Boulangé CL, Pedersen HK, Martin FP, Siegwald L, Pallejà Caro A, Eklund AC, Jia W, Zhang H, Berger B, Sprenger N, Heine RG, Cinnamon Study Investigator Group. An Extensively Hydrolyzed Formula Supplemented with Two Human Milk Oligosaccharides Modifies the Fecal Microbiome and Metabolome in Infants with Cow's Milk Protein Allergy. Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Jul 13;24(14):11422. doi: 10.3390/ijms241411422. PMID: 37511184; PMCID: PMC10379726.
  4. Gold MS, Quinn PJ, Campbell DE, Peake J, Smart J, Robinson M, O'Sullivan M, Vogt JK, Pedersen HK, Liu X, Pazirandeh-Micol E, Heine RG. Effects of an Amino Acid-Based Formula Supplemented with Two Human Milk Oligosaccharides on Growth, Tolerability, Safety, and Gut Microbiome in Infants with Cow's Milk Protein Allergy. Nutrients. 2022 May 30;14(11):2297. doi: 10.3390/nu14112297. PMID: 35684099; PMCID: PMC9182596.
  5. Martin FP, Tytgat HLP, Krogh Pedersen H, Moine D, Eklund AC, Berger B, Sprenger N. Host-microbial co-metabolites modulated by human milk oligosaccharides relate to reduced risk of respiratory tract infections. Front Nutr. 2022 Aug 4;9:935711. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2022.935711. PMID: 35990340; PMCID: PMC9386273.
  6. Wallingford JC, Neve Myers P, Barber CM. Effects of addition of 2-fucosyllactose to infant formula on growth and specific pathways of utilization by Bifidobacterium in healthy term infants. Front Nutr. 2022 Sep 23;9:961526. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2022.961526. PMID: 36211486; PMCID: PMC9539000.