UPSIDE Breast Milk and Fecal Microbiome Raw sequence reads
The modern way to provide infants with breast milk is bottle-feeding expressed breastmilk to infants. This process involves subjecting milk to storage and temperatures, which could affect microbial communities, as well as pooling milk expressed at different times or lack of synchrony between milk production in the mother and consumption by the infant.We hypothesize that in relation to direct breastfeeding, bottle-feeding expressed breast milk alters the gut microbiome in infants, as well as the milk microbiome.The aims of this study are:1: to determine fecal microbiome differences in infants fed expressed breast milk versus direct breastfeeding2: to determine differences in the milk microbiome between mothers that express breast milk versus directly breastfeeding their infants only.