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INTRODUCTION: Premature infants are at risk of developing a diverse array of diseases and health problems. Breast milk seems to be protective against neonatal diseases such as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a disease characterized by damage to the infant's intestinal tract. In the US, NEC is more common in African American infants compared to every other ethnicity. One protective factor seems to be oligosaccharides, specifically disialyllacto-N-tetraose (DSLNT). Therefore, this study examined the effect of ethnicity on DSLNT levels. METHODS: Breast milk was collected from 130 breastfeeding mothers that delivered term infants from day of delivery out to 338 days postpartum. Mothers self-reported their race. Breast milk was processed and analyzed by LC/MS (ESI-Q-TOF) to determine DSLNT concentrations. Primary unadjusted analysis was a two-sample t-test. Adjusted analysis by ANOVA (adjusting for days of lactation) with self-reported ethnicity dichotomized to African American or Other. IRB approval was obtained for this study. RESULTS: Self-reported race identified 66 African Americans and 64 individuals of other races in our study population. When adjusting for day of lactation, race did not have a significant effect (p-value=0.5770) on DSLNT content in term milk. CONCLUSION: DSLNT may be an important human milk oligosaccharide in preventing devastating neonatal disease. Although past studies have postulated that geographical differences in the oligosaccharide may exist, our study did not identify racial differences in the oligosaccharide in the breast milk of term neonates at our center.