Comparative Proteomics of Human Milk From Eight Cities in China During Six Months of Lactation in the Chinese Human Milk Project Study.

Ratna Nurmalita Sari,Jiancun Pan,Shilong Jiang,Jiaping Lv,Xiaoyang Pang,Yuanyuan Li,Wenyuan Zhang,Huiquan Zhu,Jing Lu,Shuwen Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnut.2021.682429

Abstract

Human milk (HM) is the golden standard of infant nutrition that can protect immature body function and enhance nutrition metabolism to ensure infant growth. Region specificity and lactation period could change the protein composition in HM. In this research, proteomics analysis was used to compare proteomes across eight cities, namely Harbin, Lanzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Jinhua, Weihai, Zhengzhou, and Beijing, which represented the northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, east, and north and central regions of China,. Proteins varied significantly among the cities. These different proteins were mainly involved in the process of platelet degranulation, innate immune response, and triglyceride metabolic process, which might be due to different living environments. These differences also lead to variation in protection and fat metabolism from mothers to infants in different cities. Four proteins were expressed differently during 6 months of lactation, namely Dipeptidyl peptidase 1, Lysozyme C, Carbonic anhydrase 6, and Chordin-like protein 2. The changes in these proteins might be because of the change of growth needs of the infants. The findings from our results might help to improve the understanding of HM as well as to design infant formula.

Highlights

Human milk (HM) is a complex liquid that contains variative compositions among mothers
The metabolism function was represented by terms of proteolysis and carbohydrate metabolic process
Several immune related functions showed to be significant in the Gene ontology biological process (GOBP) enrichment, such as antigen processing and presentation, immune response, and innate immune response with a p-value of 1.28 x 10−28, 4.42 x 10−11, and 1.40 x 10−7, respectively

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Human milk (HM) is a complex liquid that contains variative compositions among mothers. It consists of true solutions, colloids, membranes, membrane-bound globules, and cells [1]. Human Milk Proteomics in CHMP Study variation of HM and ruminant’s milk have been observed [3, 8,9,10] Those prior studies found that HM proteome contributed to various functions including immune protection, biological growth, and maturation of the digestive tract. The variation of quantitative proteomes between Chinese and Dutch HM serum and the different proteomes across Chinese ethnicity and geographic location has been revealed [13, 14] They studied milk serum proteome of four different regions in China, mainly focused on the western region of China, namely Yunnan, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The result of this research will build in-depth understanding of proteomes in each city for further use, for instance, the development of infant formula for the infants that could not access sufficient HM

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RESULTS

CONCLUSION

ETHICS STATEMENT