Doctoral Dissertation Research: Impacts of maternal environment on milk immunofactors and infant immune system development

除了是婴儿的第一餐，母乳还是药。牛奶中的分子可以保护婴儿免受传染病的侵袭。最近的技术进步使科学家能够充分探索母乳中含有的各种分子。为了更好地了解母乳提供的免疫保护的变异来源，该项目将调查母亲目前和童年所处的环境如何影响其母乳中关键免疫分子的组成。这项研究还将探索这些牛奶分子的变化如何影响婴儿的免疫系统发育，并考虑免疫系统在人类进化过程中是如何变化的。这项研究对社会有直接的好处，包括为父母的婴儿喂养决定、捐赠者母乳银行政策和婴儿配方奶粉组成提供信息。这项工作还将通过在美国和波兰建立的项目，为女性和代表性不足的群体创造培训科学的机会。每月将在波兰的Mogielica人类生态学研究地点从母亲那里收集牛奶样本。这一研究地点包括不同程度参与传统农业和现金经济的村庄，导致小地理区域内环境的独特多样性。牛奶样本将在美国进行分析，使用质谱仪对选定的免疫分子进行分析。然后将牛奶成分与详细的健康史访谈进行比较，以确定母亲环境的哪些方面对牛奶中免疫因素的水平影响最大。为了探索牛奶成分变化对婴儿的影响，将牛奶成分与婴儿免疫功能的唾液测量进行比较。这项研究在纵向设计上是独一无二的，这将使研究人员能够将牛奶成分和婴儿免疫功能的变化与环境联系起来。这项研究将对现有的生物人类学文献做出重大贡献，扩大我们对牛奶中分泌的免疫因子如何与童年和当前母体环境中的暴露有关的知识。这些发现不仅对公共卫生有影响，而且对于理解人类进化转变的生理适应也很重要。

In addition to being an infant's first food, human breast milk is medicine. Molecules in milk can protect infants from infectious illness. Recent technological advances now allow scientists to fully explore the wide range of molecules contained in mother's milk. To better understand the sources of variation in the immune protection provided by breast milk, this project will investigate how the mother's current and childhood environments impact the composition of key immune molecules in her milk. This research will also explore how the variation of these milk molecules might influence infant immune system development and consider how the immune system has changed during human evolution. This research has direct benefits to society, including informing parent's infant-feeding decisions, donor milk bank policies, and infant formula composition. This work will also create opportunities for training women and under-represented groups in science through established programs in the US and Poland.Monthly milk samples will be collected from mothers at the Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site in Poland. This study location encompasses villages with varying levels of participation in traditional agriculture and a cash economy, leading to a unique diversity of environments in a small geographic area. The milk samples will be analyzed in the United States using mass spectrometry for selected immune molecules. Milk composition will then be compared to detailed health history interviews to determine what aspects of the maternal environment most influence levels of immune factors in the milk. To explore consequences of variation in milk composition for the infant, milk composition will be compared to salivary measures of the infant's immune function. This study is unique in its longitudinal design, which will allow the researchers to contextualize variation in milk composition and infant immune function in relation to the environment. This study will make a substantial contribution to the existing biological anthropology literature by expanding our knowledge of how immune factors secreted in milk relate to childhood and current exposures in the maternal environment. These findings not only have public health implications but are important for understanding physiological adaptations to human evolutionary transitions.