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How a beneficial gut microbe adapted to breast milk
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If you recall, couple of days back, I shared that synergy plays vital role in nature. In fact, each organism, except humans, performs स्वधर्म!
As a mother of infant, breast-feeding is not mere for your kid!! It is for microbes too!! Infant’s gut microbe colonies are building and they also need your milk!
Now, replace human mother with गौ माता! Just connect the dots! Why terrain-specific cow milk. Why freely grazing cows! Why cows must not be curfew-ed!
Imagine when modern mothers replace breat-milk by formula milk!
🙁
Imagine when we idiots replace raw desi cow milk by processed dairy milk! 🙁
GUT microbes never get their vital sugar!! Eternal hunger in a case when breast-feeding is stopped and raw desi cow milk is not started!
And you expect them work for you synergestically?
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Breast milk provides vital nutrients not only to infants, but also to beneficial microbes that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract. A study published April 6 in Cell Chemical Biology shows that a bacterial species called Bifidobacterium longum has successfully adapted to the unique niche of the infant gut by producing an enzyme called LnbX, which enables this microbe to grow on a sugar that is abundant only in human milk.
“Given the health-promoting effects of bifidobacteria, our findings reveal a possible evolutionary route for the breast milk-driven symbiosis between gut microbes and humans,” says co-senior study author Takane Katayama of Kyoto University.
Gut microbes in early life are thought to have long-lasting effects on human health, and studies have shown that diet strongly influences the composition of this population. For example, human milk sugars are known to selectively promote the growth of beneficial gut microbes such as bifidobacteria, which prevent diarrhea and pathogenic infection in infants. One major component of human milk is a sugar called lacto-N-tetraose, which is virtually absent in the milk of other mammals. Bifidobacteria produce enzymes that break down this sugar, strongly suggesting that a symbiotic relationship recently evolved between these microorganisms and humans.
While investigating how this symbiotic relationship evolved, Katayama and co-senior study author Shinya Fushinobu of the University of Tokyo previously characterized LnbB and isolated LnbX—enzymes that degrade lacto-N-tetraose in Bifidobacterium bifidum and Bifidobacterium longum, respectively. In the new study, the researchers set out to build on these findings by determining the X-ray crystal structure of the catalytic domain of LnbX. The crystal structure, in combination with mutation and pharmacological experiments, revealed that LnbX has a distinct structure and catalytic mechanism from LnbB and therefore belongs to a novel family of glycoside hydrolase enzymes called GH136.
