Human milk microbial species are associated with mild growth deficits during early infancy among Guatemalan mother–infant dyads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growth faltering is common in Guatemalan indigenous communities, but the possibility that it may be related to milk microbial composition has not been explored. For this cross-sectional study, unrelated mother–infant dyads ( n = 64) from eight communities in the remote Western Highlands of Guatemala were recruited. Milk samples and infant length-for-age and weight-for-age Z -scores were collected at two stages of lactation: early (6–46 days postpartum, n = 29) or late (109–184 days postpartum, n = 35). Within each stage of lactation, infants were subdivided into mildly underweight [weight-for-age Z -score (WAZ) < –1 SD] or normal weight (WAZ ≥ –1 SD) and mildly stunted [length-for-age Z -score (LAZ) < –1.5 SD] or non-stunted (LAZ ≥ –1.5 SD). 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing was used to identify milk microbial communities, and DESeq2 was used to compare the differential abundance (DA) of human milk microbiota at the species level for WAZ and LAZ subgroups at each stage of lactation. A total of 503 ESVs annotated as 256 putative species across the 64 human milk samples were identified. Alpha diversity did not differ, but beta-diversity redundancy analysis identified four distinct clusters among the four WAZ ( p = 0.004) and LAZ subgroups ( p = 0.001). DA identified 15 different taxa in the WAZ and 11 in the LAZ groups in early lactation and 8 in the WAZ and 19 in the LAZ groups in late lactation. Mothers’ milk had more DA taxa of oropharyngeal and environmental bacteria with opportunistic activities in the LAZ < –1.5 SD infants, whereas the LAZ ≥ –1.5 SD had DA taxa with potential probiotic and antimicrobial inhibitory activity against pathogens. In particular, milk microbial communities of infants not classified as underweight or stunted had more beneficial species including Lactococcus_lactis . These findings suggest the potential associations between the milk microbiome at the species level with infant growth prior to 6 months of age. These data provide important evidence of the associations between the human milk microbiome and the growth of breastfed infants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".