Horizontal gene transfer5/17/2023 "In the future, we might be able to utilize this knowledge to help prevent, diagnose, or treat health problems.Tuesday, Do the Genes Jump from Snakes to Frogs? "Next, we want to explore whether this early life process, influenced by mom, is affecting not only short-term infection risk in the first year of life but also longer-term health in terms of things like allergies and asthma," says Bogaert. Ultimately, the researchers want to understand how microbiome development in infants relates to long-term health. "It would be interesting to stratify that unknown fraction to see where all the microbes come from whether fathers contribute, for example, or siblings, or the environment." "We could see that the maternal microbiome explains almost 60% of the infant's total microbiome, but there's still 40% that we don't know about," says de Steenhuijsen Piters. Now, the team want to know more about non-maternal influences on infant microbiome development. "It's a smart system, and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that these types of pathways are redundant to ensure that the child can begin life with the appropriate 'starter kit,'" says de Steenhuijsen Piters. "Breastfeeding becomes even more important for children born by cesarean section who do not receive gut and vaginal microbes from their mom." "Microbiome transfer and development are so important that evolution has ensured that those microbes are transferred one or another way from mother to child," says first author Debby Bogaert, a physician scientist at the University of Edinburgh. Cesarean-born babies received fewer microbes from their mother's vaginal and fecal microbiomes, but-seemingly in compensation-acquired more microbes from breastmilk. However, different maternal microbial communities contributed to different infant microbiomes. Regardless of birth route, the researchers found that approximately 58.5% of a baby's microbiome is derived from its mother. "We saw that many niches of the mother are important for the transmission of microbes, and if some of these pathways are blocked for one reason or another-in this case, we saw that happening with the cesarean section-then these microbes can still reach the infant through other paths," says de Steenhuijsen Piters. Then, they analyzed these results in the context of several factors that are thought to impact microbiome transfer, including mode of delivery, antibiotic use, and breastfeeding. The team also collected six different types of microbiome samples from the mothers-skin, breastmilk, nose, throat, fecal, and vaginal-to determine which of these sources were "seeding" the babies' various microbiomes. From the babies, they collected skin, nose, saliva, and gut microbiome samples two hours after they were born and when they were one day old, one week old, two weeks old, and one month old. To understand how the microbiome develops during the first month of life, the team recruited and repeatedly sampled 120 Dutch mothers and soon-to-be-born babies. "We wanted to have a better idea of how the infant microbiome develops in different parts of their bodies and how it's influenced by factors such as birth mode, antibiotic use, and lack of breastfeeding," says senior author Wouter de Steenhuijsen Piters, a physician and data scientist at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. This study helps clarify how babies, who are generally considered sterile before birth, get essential microbes for their various microbiomes. Most microbiome research has focused on the gut, but we also house beneficial microbial communities in other parts of our bodies, such as in our respiratory tracts and on our skin.
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