A 1-H NMR-BASED METABOLOMIC APPROACH REVEALS SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN BREAST MILK COMPOSITION INDUCED BY ORAL PROBIOTIC SUPPLEMENTATION

Pregnancy and the first two years of life are the most critical time periods for interventions to improve child growth and development. In this scenario, both the microbiota and breast milk which are ‘transmitted’ from mother to infant seem to play a crucial role for the promotion of a healthy growth in newborn. Perinatal supplementation with probiotics has been recently proposed as a possible strategy to manipulate maternal physiology, from gut microbiota to breast milk composition, in order to orchestrate the infant development. In this study, we applied a 1H NMR-based metabolomic approach to characterize the breast milk metabolome and possible changes in breast milk composition induced by oral supplementation with VSL#3 probiotic mixture. Our metabolomic approach revealed a systemic effect of the maternal probiotic supplementation on the production or secretion of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and lipids in the mammary gland. Such an approach may become increasingly useful as a tool to design and evaluate dietary and therapeutic strategies aimed at improving the health status of the mother-infant dyad.