Abstract
Studies focused on the stomach microbiota are relatively scarce, and most of them are focused on the adult population. The aim of this work is to describe the bacterial communities inhabiting the gastric content (GC) of preterm neonates. For that purpose, GC samples were collected weekly from a total of 13 preterm neonates during their first month of life within their hospital stay. Samples were analyzed by using both culture-dependent and -independent techniques. The former allowed the isolation of bacteria belonging mainly to the genera Enterococcus, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Serratia, Klebsiella, and Escherichia. The cultured dominant species in the GC samples during all the hospitalization period were Enterococcus faecalis and Staphylococcus epidermidis. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis revealed the presence of high-risk clonal complexes associated with the hospital environment, which may colonize enteral feeding tubes. Similarly, the 16S rRNA sequencing showed that Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Lactobacillus, Enterococcus, Corynebacterium, and Propionibacterium were the dominant genera present at 75% of the gastric samples. However, the genera Serratia, Klebsiella, and Streptococcus were the most abundant. Own mother’s milk (OMM) and donor milk (DM) were collected after their pass through the external feeding tubes to assess their bacterial content. OMM and DM had a similar bacterial pattern to GC. Based on these data, the GC of preterm neonates is dominated by Proteobacteria and Firmicutes and harbors high-risk bacterial clones, which may colonize enteral feeding tubes, and therefore the feeds that pass through them.
Highlights
The early colonization of the infant digestive tract is a complex process that has relevant consequences for health throughout the life span [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The objectives of this work were, first, to describe the bacterial communities inhabiting the gastric content (GC) of preterm neonates using culture-dependent techniques; such approach included the characterization of the bacterial lineages in the case of species frequently involved in preterm sepsis; and second, to apply the culture-independent techniques to describe the microbiome of a subset of samples
A total of 38 GC samples collected during the first month of life were analyzed by culture-based methods: 6 samples from the first day of life, 8 from the first week of life, 11 from the second week of life, 11 from the third week of life, and 2 from the fourth week of life
Summary
The early colonization of the infant digestive tract is a complex process that has relevant consequences for health throughout the life span [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The initial colonization process is challenging in preterm newborns, because of organ immaturity, higher rates of C-section deliveries, frequent use of antibiotics, and the stay at the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) [13]. Under such conditions, it is not strange that preterm infants are frequently associated with an abnormal intestinal colonization pattern [14, 15], a fact that increases susceptibility to disease [16,17,18]. The intestinal microbiota of preterm infants exhibits a significantly reduced bacterial diversity, an abundance of microorganisms usually related to hospital environments, and a reduced proportion of strict anaerobes with respect to facultative ones [19,20,21,22,23]
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