The Influence of Different Maternal Microbial Communities on the Development of Infant Gut and Oral Microbiota

Abstract

Very few studies have analyzed how the composition of mother's microbiota affects the development of infant's gut and oral microbiota during the first months of life. Here, microbiota present in the mothers' gut, vagina, breast milk, oral cavity, and mammary areola were compared with the gut and oral microbiota of their infants over the first six months following birth. Samples were collected from the aforementioned body sites from seven mothers and nine infants at three different time points over a 6-month period. Each sample was analyzed with 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The gut microbiota of the infants harbored distinct microbial communities that had low similarity with the various maternal microbiota communities. In contrast, the oral microbiota of the infants exhibited high similarity with the microbiota of the mothers' breast milk, mammary areola and mouth. These results demonstrate that constant contact between microbial communities increases their similarity. A majority of the operational taxonomic units in infant gut and oral microbiota were also shared with the mothers' gut and oral communities, respectively. The disparity between the similarity and the proportion of the OTUs shared between infants' and mothers' gut microbiota might be related to lower diversity and therefore competition in infants' gut microbiota.

Figure 1

The number and type of samples that were collected from the mother-infant pairs at each of the time points indicated.

Figure 2

Correlation plot representing the Cosine similarity index values between the analyzed microbial community types. The time points represent the sampling times in relation to birth of the infants.

Figure 3

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plot visualizing the Jaccard distance between the samples of analyzed microbial community types.

Figure 4

Relative abundance of the most dominant OTUs that colonized the analyzed community types.

Figure 5

Proportion of OTUs observed in the pooled data of infants’ gut (A) and oral (B) microbiota that were shared with mothers’ community types. *Infants’ gut and oral microbiota at every analyzed time point were compared to vaginal microbiota observed in mothers before giving birth.

Figure 6

Average proportion with 95% confidence interval of OTUs observed in infants’ gut (A) and oral (B) microbiota that were shared with his or her mother’s community types (the proportion shared between specific mother-infant pairs). *Infants’ gut and oral microbiota at every analyzed time point was compared to vaginal microbiota observed in mothers before giving birth.

Figure 7

Average Cosine similarity index between infant’s gut (A) and oral (B) microbiota and their own mother’s microbial community types (red dots), and the community types observed in the rest of the mothers (Tukey boxplot).