Abstract
Early gut microbial colonization is driven by many factors, including mode of birth, breastfeeding, and other environmental conditions. Characters of maternal-neonatal microbiota were analyzed from two distinct populations in similar latitude but different continents (Oriental Asia and Europe). A total number of 120 healthy families from China (n=60) and Spain (n=60) were included. Maternal and neonatal microbiota profiles were obtained at birth by 16S rRNA gene profiling. Clinical records were collected. Geographical location influenced maternal-neonatal microbiota. Indeed, neonatal and maternal cores composed by nine genera each one were found independently of location. Geographical location was the most important variable that impact the overall structure of maternal and neoantal microbiota. For neonates, delivery mode effect on neonatal microbial community could modulate how the other perinatal factors, as geographical location or maternal BMI, impact the neoantal initial seeding. Furthermore, lower maternal pre-pregnancy BMI was associated with higher abundance of Faecalibacterium in maternal microbiota and members from Lachnospiraceae family in both mothers and infants. At genus-level, Chinese maternal-neonate dyads possessed higher number of phylogenetic shared microbiota than that of Spanish dyads. Bifidobacterium and Escherichia/Shigella were the genera most shared between dyads in the two groups highlighting their importance in neonatal colonization and mother-infant transmission. Our data showed that early gut microbiota establishment and development is affected by interaction of complex variables, where environment would be a critical factor.
Highlights
An adequate early microbial colonization is crucial for proper immunological and metabolic development (Clemente et al, 2012)
Maternal gut microbiota would reflect the impact of specific factors and other environmental exposures, such as diet, lifestyle and antibiotic exposure, which could be transferred to the neonate at birth and later, during lactation (Dominguez-Bello et al, 2010; Koleva et al, 2015)
Several studies have explored the impact of perinatal factors on early gut microbial colonization, but available information about the potential impact of geographical location, including diet, lifestyle and climate on maternal-neonatal microbiota composition, is still scarce
Summary
An adequate early microbial colonization is crucial for proper immunological and metabolic development (Clemente et al, 2012). Neonatal gut colonization represents the de novo assembly of a complex microbial community, a process that is influenced by several environmental and host factors (Koleva et al, 2015) This complex process, still not well understood, and follows a time frame sequence depending on primary events at birth, such as delivery mode and feeding type, and subsequently undergoes a dynamic and non-random process during the development and maturation of infant gut microbiota (Sprockett et al, 2018). In this scenario, maternal microbiota represents one of the major determinants in the assembly of the offspring’s microbial profile (Dominguez-Bello et al, 2010; Ferretti et al, 2018). Previous studies have been shown a differential impact of specific factors on milk microbiota according to geographical location (Kumar et al, 2016), while the data on maternalneonatal gut microbiota was not provided
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