Mother-to-Infant Microbial Transmission from Different Body Sites Shapes the Developing Infant Gut Microbiome

By Pamela Ferretti, Edoardo Pasolli, Adrian Tett, F. Asnicar, Valentina Gorfer, Sabina Fedi, F. Armanini, Duy Tin Truong, S. Manara, Moreno Zolfo and 35 more. Cell Host and Microbe, 2018

1,085 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The acquisition and development of the infant microbiome are key to establishing a healthy host-microbiome symbiosis. The maternal microbial reservoir is thought to play a crucial role in this process. However, the source and transmission routes of the infant pioneering microbes are poorly understood. To address this, we longitudinally sampled the microbiome of 25 mother-infant pairs across multiple body sites from birth up to 4 months postpartum. Strain-level metagenomic profiling showed a rapid influx of microbes at birth followed by strong selection during the first few days of life. Maternal skin and vaginal strains colonize only transiently, and the infant continues to acquire microbes from distinct maternal sources after birth. Maternal gut strains proved more persistent in the infant gut and ecologically better adapted than those acquired from other sources. Together, these data describe the mother-to-infant microbiome transmission routes that are integral in the development of the infant microbiome.

Subfields: Dermatology, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1040374b9f1b3e9809aa1b0a8ac5fdb38c9c29a6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Infectious Diseases

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Integrating taxonomic, functional, and strain-level profiling of diverse microbial communities with bioBakery 3 (2020, background): “Phylogenetic trees produced by StrainPhlan 3 can also be used to identify identical strains across samples, which can be exploited, for example, in strain transmission analyses (Ferretti et al., 2018; Shao et al., 2019) .”
Extensive Unexplored Human Microbiome Diversity Revealed by Over 150,000 Genomes from Metagenomes Spanning Age, Geography, and Lifestyle (2019, positive): “Compared samples included sputum from cystic ﬁbrosis patients (Manara et al., 2018), stool and breast milk samples from mother-infant pairs (Ferretti et al., 2018), and feces of adults consuming fermented milk product containing a probiotic strain (Nielsen et al., 2014).”
The gut microbiome: Relationships with disease and opportunities for therapy (2018, background): “Gut microbiome and chronic inflammatory disease 21 the factors influencing early-life microbiome assembly is pioneer microbial colonization, which likely influences niche-specific microbiome development via local nutrient utilization and/or production of molecules that dictate interspecies compatibi”
Impact of antibiotics on the human microbiome and consequences for host health (2022, background): “It is largely accepted that the mother is the most important source of the gut microbiota for infants (Asnicar et al., 2017; Ferretti et al., 2018).”
Extending and improving metagenomic taxonomic profiling with uncharacterized species using MetaPhlAn 4 (2023, background): “StrainPhlAn 4 also allows the analysis of strain sharing and transmission between communities 4,25,28,73,77–79 for uncharacterized species, that is, uSGBs (see Methods).”