Fetal gut microbiome develops after birth
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The fetal gut microbiome of healthy term infants developed during and after birth but not before, according to research published in Nature Microbiology.
“Recent studies have sparked controversy by claiming that we are colonized by bacteria before birth. However, studies such as these are fraught with confounders and methods for controlling for contamination are often not as robust as needed,” Deborah M. Sloboda, BSc, MSc, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University, told Healio. “We believe that many (if not all) of these studies failed to control or account for contamination. Therefore, we set about to develop stringent methods to control for contamination, to test whether the fetal gut is actually colonized before birth.”
To investigate whether gut colonization occurs before birth, researchers compared fetal meconium (n = 20) with negative controls (n = 5), first-pass meconium (n=14) and infant stool (n = 25). Sloboda added that they collected fetal meconium from breech cesarean sections, developed specialized surgical draping and expanded the area of disinfection to avoid the mother’s vaginal microbiota and skin microbiota during delivery; these measures aimed to minimize any contamination in sampled meconium before the babies were fully delivered.
According to study results, 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing detected no microbial signal distinct from controls in fetal meconium. Researchers noted that although10 fetal meconium aerobic clinical cultures and 12 fetal meconium anaerobic clinical cultures tested positive, they were identified as likely skin contaminants undetected from RNA gene sequencing among most samples.
“Our study serves two purposes: it shows stringent experimental methods with robust controls are critical in producing highly reliable, reproducible robust data and we are not normally colonized before birth,” Sloboda concluded. “Our relationship with our symbionts emerges during and after birth, which makes it not only vulnerable to early environmental influences but also offers a window of potential intervention.”
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