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MFGM components promote gut Bifidobacterium growth in infant and in vitro

  • Original Contribution
  • Published:
European Journal of Nutrition Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Infant gut microbiota which plays an important role in long-term health is mainly shaped by early life nutrition. However, the effect of nutrients on infants gut microbiota is less researched. Here, we present a study aiming to investigate in vitro a modified formula that is supplemented with milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) that were missing in common formulas when compared with human milk and to assess the impact of feeding scheme on microbiota and metabolism.

Methods

A total of 44 infants including 16 from breast milk feeding, 13 from common formula feeding and 15 from modified formula feeding were analyzed, and A cross-sectional sampling of fecal and urine was done at 1 month-of-age. Stool microbiota composition was characterized using high-throughput DNA sequencing, and urinary metabolome was profiled by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). In vitro growth experiment of Bifidobacterium with key components from MFGM was performed and analyzed by both DNA and RNA.

Results

Stool samples from the infants who were breastfed had a higher relative abundance of Bifidobacterium and a lower relative abundance of Escherichia than the formula-fed infants. The stool microbiome shifts were associated with urine metabolites changes. Three substances including lactadherin, sialic acid and phospholipid, key components of MFGM were significantly positively correlated to Bifidobacterium of stool samples from infants, and stimulated the growth rate of Bifidobacterium significantly by provided energy in vitro growth experiment with RNA analysis.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that the key components from MFGM could improve infants’ health by modulating the gut microbiome, and possibly supporting the growth of Bifidobacterium.

Registration

Clinicaltrials.gov NCT02658500 (registered on January 20, 2016).

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Data availability

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to ethical and privacy considerations but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

Not applicable.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the infants and their parents participating in this study for their trust. We also thank the study team for their involvement in this work, especially nurses and coordinators. We thank Dr Jufang Li and Dr Xueyan Dong for helping collecting samples, and we also thank Dr Jun Wang and Dr Yue Ma for bioinformatic analysis and revision.

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 32072191, Beijing Science and Technology Plan No. Z201100008020005, Daxing District Major Scientific and Technological Achievements Transformation Project No. 2020006, National Key Research and Development Program No. 2019YFF0216702, Beijing Science and Technology Plan No. Z201100002620005.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Center of Dairy for Maternal and Child Health, Beijing Sanyuan Foods Co. Ltd., No. 8, Yingchang Street, Yinghai Town, Daxing District, Beijing, 100163, China

    Junying Zhao, Bin Liu, Tiemin Jiang, Weicang Qiao, Yanpin Liu & Lijun Chen

  2. Beijing Engineering Research Center of Dairy, Beijing Technical Innovation Center of Human Milk Research, Beijing Sanyuan Foods Co. Ltd., No. 8, Yingchang Street, Yinghai Town, Daxing District, Beijing, 100163, China

    Junying Zhao, Bin Liu, Weicang Qiao, Yanpin Liu & Lijun Chen

  3. Beijing Ditan Hospital Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100015, China

    Wei Yi

  4. Capital Institute of Pediatrics, Beijing, 100020, China

    Yaohua Dai

  5. South Asia Branch of National Engineering Center of Dairy for Maternal and Child Health, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin, 541006, China

    Tiemin Jiang

  6. Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, 471000, Henan Province, China

    Shuxing Chen

  7. XiangYa School of Public Health, Central South University, Changsha, 410078, Hunan Province, China

    Jianwu Wang

  8. Tongzhou Maternal and Child Health Hospital of Beijing, Beijing, 101101, China

    Baowen Feng

  9. Maternal and Child Health Hospital of Liuyang of Hunan Province, Changsha, 410300, Hunan Province, China

    Huihuang Zhou

  10. Luoyang Northern Enterprises Group Hospital, Luoyang, 471000, Henan Province, China

    Jianying He

  11. Food Science College of Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, 150030, China

    Juncai Hou

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  1. Junying Zhao
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  2. Wei Yi
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  3. Bin Liu
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Contributions

JZ: investigation, data curation, writing original draft preparation; WY: methodology, investigation, data curation; BL: data curation, writing original draft preparation; YD: methodology, investigation; TJ: methodology, investigation; SC: investigation; JW: investigation; BF: investigation; WQ: investigation; YL: investigation; HZ: investigation; JH: investigation; JH: methodology; LC: conceptualization, methodology, infant formula design, funding acquisition, resources.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lijun Chen.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

There was no conflicts of interest/competing interests for this article.

Ethical approval

The Ethics Committee of Beijing Ditan Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University approved all aspects of the study (#2015-027-01).

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all of the parents.

Consent for publication

All authors were consent for publicaiton.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 Flowchart of the research process (PPT 158 KB)

394_2021_2638_MOESM2_ESM.tiff

Supplementary file2 Principle coordinated analysis (unweighted Unifrac distance) of stool microbiome of three feeding schemes including Breast feeding (BF), common formula feeding (FF1) and modified formula feeding (FF2) (TIFF 537 KB)

394_2021_2638_MOESM3_ESM.tif

Supplementary file3 Alpha-diversity analysis of stool microbiome of three feeding schemes. Breast feeding (BF), common formula feeding (FF1) and modified formula feeding (FF2) (TIF 403 KB)

394_2021_2638_MOESM4_ESM.docx

Supplementary file4 Relative abundance of Bifidobacterium, Veillonella and Escherichia/Shigella of three feeding schemes. Breast feeding (BF), common formula feeding (FF1) and modified formula feeding (FF2) (DOCX 1239 KB)

394_2021_2638_MOESM5_ESM.docx

Supplementary file5 Dot plot of gene enrichment analysis of Bifidobacterium cultured with MFGM components in vitro. Supplemental Table 2. Anthropometric measures as well as clinical parameters of 1 month of infant. (DOCX 31 KB)

Supplementary file6 Supplemental Table 1. Baseline characteristics by randomized treatment. (DOCX 18 KB)

Supplementary file7 Association analysis of urinary metabolites with gut microbiota of infants (XLS 456 KB)

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Zhao, J., Yi, W., Liu, B. et al. MFGM components promote gut Bifidobacterium growth in infant and in vitro. Eur J Nutr 61, 277–288 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-021-02638-5

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