Human milk fungi: environmental determinants and inter-kingdom associations with milk bacteria in the CHILD Cohort Study.
BACKGROUND
Fungi constitute an important yet frequently neglected component of the human microbiota with a possible role in health and disease. Fungi and bacteria colonise the infant gastrointestinal tract in parallel, yet most infant microbiome studies have ignored fungi. Milk is a source of diverse and viable bacteria, but few studies have assessed the diversity of fungi in human milk.


RESULTS
Here we profiled mycobiota in milk from 271 mothers in the CHILD birth cohort and detected fungi in 58 (21.4%). Samples containing detectable fungi were dominated by Candida, Alternaria, and Rhodotorula, and had lower concentrations of two human milk oligosaccharides (disialyllacto-N-tetraose and lacto-N-hexaose). The presence of milk fungi was associated with multiple outdoor environmental features (city, population density, and season), maternal atopy, and early-life antibiotic exposure. In addition, despite a strong positive correlation between bacterial and fungal richness, there was a co-exclusion pattern between the most abundant fungus (Candida) and most of the core bacterial genera.


CONCLUSION
We profiled human milk mycobiota in a well-characterised cohort of mother-infant dyads and provide evidence of possible host-environment interactions in fungal inoculation. Further research is required to establish the role of breastfeeding in delivering fungi to the developing infant, and to assess the health impact of the milk microbiota in its entirety, including both bacterial and fungal components.
['Moossavi|Shirin|S|', 'Fehr|Kelsey|K|', 'Derakhshani|Hooman|H|', 'Sbihi|Hind|H|', 'Robertson|Bianca|B|', 'Bode|Lars|L|', 'Brook|Jeffrey|J|', 'Turvey|Stuart E|SE|', 'Moraes|Theo J|TJ|', 'Becker|Allan B|AB|', 'Mandhane|Piushkumar J|PJ|', 'Sears|Malcolm R|MR|', 'Khafipour|Ehsan|E|', 'Subbarao|Padmaja|P|', 'Azad|Meghan B|MB|0000-0002-5942-4444']
D001942:Breast Feeding D015331:Cohort Studies D004271:DNA, Fungal D004275:DNA, Ribosomal D005260:Female D005658:Fungi D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing D006801:Humans D007223:Infant D064307:Microbiota D008895:Milk, Human D009035:Mothers D009844:Oligosaccharides D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S D012307:Risk Factors D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
Human milk Fungi CHILD cohort study Mycobiota Breastfeeding Breastmilk Environment