Metabolomic and lipidomic approaches for fact-based nutrition assessment in infants and lactating mothers

Doctoranda: Victoria Ramos García
Dirigida por:  Dra. Julia Kuligowski y Dra. Isabel Ten Doménech

Grupo de Investigación en Perinatología

This PhD thesis addressed the different metabolomic and lipidomic approaches for nutrition assessment in infants and their lactating mothers in the frame of prematurity.

Preterm infants' (PI) early nutrition is one of the most important factors in improving their clinical outcomes. In this sense, breastfeeding is the gold standard of child nutrition due to human milk (HM) nutrients and bioactive components which contribute to the optimal growth and development of the infant. When not enough own mother's milk (OMM) is available, the administration of pasteurized donor human milk (DHM) is considered a suitable alternative for preterm infants. To ensure the safety of DHM, milk banks routinely employ Holder pasteurization (HoP) in order to destroy or inactivate potential pathogenic bacteria and viruses present. However, HM composition can be affected by this process. In addition, this work has focused on the potential effect of maternal diet on HM composition. Likewise, diet is one of the key factors involved in the conformation of the intestinal microbiome, affecting microbial diversity, as well as the abundance of specific microbes.

Different sample preprocessing methods have been applied to urine, faeces and HM samples before analysis using targeted, semi-targeted and untargeted metabolomic and lipidomic analytical methods. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), gas chromatography coupled to MS (GC-MS), and attenuated total reflectance - Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) methods have been developed for the analysis of nutrition and microbiome activity biomarkers, as well as to study HM composition and the effect of HoP on it.

The different developed analytical methodologies have been successfully applied to different sets of biological samples, demonstrating their applicability in the clinical field.

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