Dissertation
WHAT’S NORMAL? CHARACTERIZATION OF MATERNAL AND INFANT MICROBIOMES AROUND THE WORLD
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2018
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/109718
Abstract
While human milk has historically been considered to be sterile, it is now recognized as a complex biological matrix containing myriad bacteria. Previous research on this topic has characterized the bacterial taxa in milk and the recipient infant’s feces, but these studies typically have focused on single populations of women and infants. Given the lack of information on the human milk microbiome, the primary purpose of the research described in this dissertation was to characterize and compare the microbial communities of milk and infant feces in selected global populations in Ethiopia, Ghana, The Gambia, Kenya, Peru, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We found that while milk and infant fecal microbiomes varied greatly both within and among populations, they also showed considerable overlap, which in turn were in general related to each other although this relationship varied by population. In this effort, we also evaluated methods for preserving the bacterial DNA in human milk when cold storage is not reliably available – a situation common in many populations of interest. We concluded that Norgen’s milk preservation kit worked well when milk samples could not be cold stored. We also conducted a pilot project to investigate whether milk produced by leprosy-infected women and uninfected women living in the CAR and Nepal contains Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy.
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Details
- Title
- WHAT’S NORMAL? CHARACTERIZATION OF MATERNAL AND INFANT MICROBIOMES AROUND THE WORLD
- Creators
- Kimberly Ann Lackey
- Contributors
- Michelle K McGuire (Advisor)Courtney L Meehan (Committee Member)Omar E Cornejo (Committee Member)Mark A McGuire (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Biological Sciences, School of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 264
- Identifiers
- 99900581508201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation