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Background Neonatal gastrointestinal (GI) bacterial community structure may be related to bacterial communities of the mother, including those of her milk. However, very little is known about the diversity in and relationships among complex bacterial communities in mother-infant dyads. Objective Our primary objective was to assess whether microbiomes of milk are associated with those of oral and fecal samples of healthy lactating women and their infants. Methods Samples were collected 9 times from day 2 to 6 mo postpartum from 21 healthy lactating women and their infants. Milk was collected via complete breast expression, oral samples via swabs, and fecal samples from tissue (mothers) and diapers (infants). Microbiomes were characterized using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene. Alpha and beta diversity indices were used to compare microbiomes across time and sample types. Membership and composition of microbiomes were analyzed using nonmetric multidimensional scaling and canonical correlation analysis (CCA). The contribution of various bacterial communities of the mother-infant dyad to both milk and infant fecal bacterial communities were estimated using SourceTracker2. Results Bacterial community structures were relatively unique to each sample type. The most abundant genus in milk and maternal and infant oral samples was Streptococcus (47.1% ± 2.3%, 53.9% ± 1.3%, and 69.1% ± 1.8%, respectively), whereas Bacteroides were predominant in maternal and infant fecal microbiomes (22.9% ± 1.3% and 21.4% ± 2.4%, respectively). The milk microbiome was more similar to the infant oral microbiome than the infant fecal microbiome. However, CCA suggested strong associations between the complex microbial communities of milk and those of all other sample types collected. Conclusions These findings suggest complex microbial interactions between breastfeeding mothers and their infants and support the hypothesis that variation in the milk microbiome may influence the infant GI microbiome.

The fecal microbiome of lactating women is relatively stable in the postpartum period and somewhat similar to that of other adult populations. Variation in dietary constituents may be related to that of relative abundance of individual bacterial taxa. Controlled dietary intervention studies will be required to determine whether these associations are causal in nature.

Background: Although animal studies have shown that exposure to glyphosate (a commonly used herbicide) does not result in glyphosate bioaccumulation in tissues, to our knowledge there are no published data on whether it is detectable in human milk and therefore consumed by breastfed infants. Objective: We sought to determine whether glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) could be detected in milk and urine produced by lactating women and, if so, to quantify typical consumption by breastfed infants. Design: We collected milk (n = 41) and urine (n = 40) samples from healthy lactating women living in and around Moscow, Idaho and Pullman, Washington. Milk and urine samples were analyzed for glyphosate and AMPA with the use of highly sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry methods validated for and optimized to each sample matrix. Results: Our milk assay, which was sensitive down to 1 mg/L for both analytes, detected neither glyphosate nor AMPA in any milk sample. Mean 6 SD glyphosate and AMPA concentrations in urine were 0.28 6 0.38 and 0.30 6 0.33 mg/L, respectively. Because of the complex nature of milk matrixes, these samples required more dilution before analysis than did urine, thus decreasing the sensitivity of the assay in milk compared with urine. No difference was found in urine glyphosate and AMPA concentrations between subjects consuming organic compared with conventionally grown foods or between women living on or near a farm/ranch and those living in an urban or suburban nonfarming area. Conclusions: Our data provide evidence that glyphosate and AMPA are not detectable in milk produced by women living in this region of the US Pacific Northwest. By extension, our results therefore suggest that dietary glyphosate exposure is not a health concern for breastfed infants. This study was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02670278.Am J Clin Nutr 2016;103:1285-90.

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