Breast Milk Microbiota Influence on Infant Immunity and Growth (BEAMING)

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ABSTRACT Understanding microbial shifts and how they affect vaccine response is central to this study. We will determine if gut microbial communities associated with breastfeeding in the HEU infant follows the same successional trajectory as HU controls and resolve the differences at functional level. How the continuous conditioning of the infant gut by the microbiota from the breast milk affects the infant microbiome and subsequent immune responses to pediatric vaccination is not known and would also be studied in this submission. Teasing out possible humoral vaccine differences due to HLA associations will be an important component to consider when identifying the mechanism and impact of microbial ecological conditioning through the breast milk towards vaccine responsiveness. Our submission proposes to use biological samples collected at regular intervals over a 12 month period from a multi-site study of well characterized cohort of mother: infant pairs of HEU and HU controls from Nigeria and South Africa to investigate both host and microbial genetic determinants of altered immunity in African infants and is therefore responsive to the RFA RM16-013. Our ongoing Canadian Institute of Health Research-funded cohort has enrolled over 500 mother: infant pairs of HEU or HU breastfed infants in Nigeria and South Africa to study the role of innate factors and activation in HIV infection. This has afforded us the opportunity to investigate microbial shifts and how they affect growth and immune response to pediatric vaccines in HEU infants as compared to matched HU controls. For this submission, we hypothesize that breast milk microbiota conditioning in newborn infants impacts growth and immune responsiveness to pediatric vaccines in the context of inherited HLA variants. We will test this hypothesis through the following specific aims: Aim 1: Compare the ontogeny of microbial structure and metabolome in longitudinal breast milk and stool samples of corresponding 200 Exclusively Breast Fed (EBF) HEU versus 100 EBF HU control, infants over the first 12 months of life to document influence of the milk microbiota on the infant gut microbiome; and their collective effect or association with growth. Aim 2: Assess the relationship between infant microbial structure and humoral immune responses to pediatric vaccines AIM 3: To associate inherited HLA gene variants with humoral immune responses to pediatric vaccines in the two infant groups. This proposal will interrogate both host and microbial genetic determinants of altered immunity in HEU and is therefore highly responsive to the RFA RM16-013.