Personalised ‘proteome profiling’ reveals the changing nutritional and immune components in breast milk

You might already know about the uniqueness of human breast milk (especially if you haven taken our Breast Milk and the Infant Microbiome full course) ….

Breast milk is personalised to each lactating person, and unique to each parent-baby dyad.

Also important to know….the components of breast milk change to suit the changing nutritional needs of the infant, and also the changing needs of the developing infant digestive and immune systems.

Now a new small proof of concept study takes this one stage further with personalised human milk ‘proteome profiling’.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition by Zhu J et al., (2021), scientists created a profile of the human milk proteome — this encompasses thousands of proteins and peptides in breast milk. (A peptide is a short chain of amino acids)

According to the paper, “proteins and endogenous peptides in human milk play an important role as nutrients for growth and have distinct functionality such as immune defense”

The study:

Milk was collected from two individual healthy milk donors, aged 29 and 32 years old with normal BMI. The milk was collected for a period of 16 weeks after…