Recorded sessions on demand will be available 24 hours after the session ends

Abstract Body

The gut is host to the largest bacterial community in the body and is also the largest immune organ, and in the newborn period is the main site experiencing rapid and dramatic interactions between host and microbes.

The talk will summarise recent findings showing the gut microbiome in term infants develops in three distinct phases, with receipt of breast milk the most significant variable associated with the gut microbiome over the first year of life. Breastfeeding increased the relative abundance of a particular bacteria, Bifidobacterium. There are likely to be numerous factors underpinning this, but one example is the ability of Bifidobacterium to utilise human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). Owning to microbiome modulation and potential to act directly on the host, interest in HMOs has increased dramatically in recent years. However, the specific HMO is important and the talk will introduce a recent study showing some HMOs may increase the infectivity of a neonatal rotavirus strain.

Moving away from term infants, I will introduce some existing and unpublished work in preterm infants showing infants who develop necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) have reduced microbial diversity, increased Proteobacteria, and reduced Bifidobacterium. I will also show strong evidence from a clinical cohort of the combined role of maternal HMOs and infant microbiome in the prediction of NEC, presenting novel opportunities for diagnostics and therapeutics. Lastly, I will introduce a recently developed model that enables the combination of preterm gut epithelium cells with bacteria in physiologically relevant conditions, allowing the mechanistic study of host-microbe interaction in early life.