When a baby is born, their bodies are overwhelmed in many ways. But in one particular way, a surge of microbes go into their gut, which come from the mother’s birth canal, gut and skin.
That kind of sounds bad, but there is an upside, and it appears to depend partially on the mother’s DNA. A study, published in the journal Microbiome, focuses on a microbe called Bifidobacterium that potentially benefits babies.
“It plays a role in preventing infections,” Zachery Lewis, a graduate student in microbiology at the University of California, Davis, who contributed to the study told NPR. “Bifidobacteria sort of push other bacteria out. They lower the gut’s pH, which a lot of pathogens don’t like.”
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Just one gene in the mother controls Bifidobacteria, and the same gene is one of many that works in the development breast milk.
One gene, called FUT2, manufactures a special sugar that Bifidobacterium loves to eat. But about 20 percent of women have a mutation in this gene. So those women make much less of the special sugar. Lewis and his colleagues thought perhaps this mutation might affect how much Bifidobacteria live in a baby’s gut. And they were right.
The study only included 44 women, but it was still telling. Twelve women had the sugar-making gene mutation, 32 did not.
Babies whose moms carry the mutation had about 10 times fewer Bifidobacteria in their guts, on average, than the babies whose moms had a working version of the gene. The former also tended to pick up the bacteria later.
“I think it’s exciting how just a single gene is enough to change the baby’s microbiome,” Lewis said. “It shows that establishing the microbiome is an intricate process, orchestrated by the breast milk.”
The research doesn’t imply that there is any specific health repercussions with babies getting the gene, but it’s something that is worth noting. .
“If you’re living in an unhygienic home, the baby will have a completely different microbiome than one in a home that gets Cloroxed every day,” Lewis says. “Our findings are for babies living in Davis, California. The gene could have totally different effects in other parts of the world.”
The study doesn’t imply that any women with the mutation necessarily shouldn’t breastfeed. The goal, according to Lewis, is primarily to figure out how to develop better formula for infants.
