Personalized Human Milk Profiling

Human milk is the truest form of personalized nutrition, supporting dynamic needs of the infant with important nutritional and bioactive constituents that change throughout lactation. Additionally, human milk is individual specific and is unique for each mother-infant dyad. Proteins and endogenous peptides are 2 key classes of major human milk components making up the proteome, each with unique and synergistic functionality, working to provide protection for the healthy development of infants. Our objective was to comprehensively characterize and quantify the human milk proteome for varying early life challenges. We assessed in-depth individual variations of the human milk proteome across lactation, by mass spectrometry. Finding that the human milk proteome showed continuous and gradual changes over lactation, and that inflammatory events correlated with a strong and rapid change in the composition of human milk proteins and peptides. Personalized human milk profiling resulted in the systematic annotation of the milk proteome, and elucidated how early onset inflammatory events can lead to infant immune training from human milk.