Microbiome Profiling Techniques Reveal Effects of Iron Fortification on the Infant Gut Microbiome

Three studies published in the journal Gut over the past 5 years describe how the gut microbiome of African infants is affected not only by dietary iron but also by the combination of iron with antibiotics – a widely prescribed medication in developing countries. These studies involved collaborations between researchers from Switzerland,¹ Kenya², South Africa³ and the Netherlands⁴.

In summary, these three studies highlight how dietary iron can be detrimental to the infant gut microbiome and why even a low dose of iron may reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics in this vulnerable group of patients. They also show how some of these problems may be addressed by giving infants a safer iron formulation by adding a prebiotic. Such solutions will undoubtedly be the topic of future studies, which will continue to make use of state of the art next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics methods for profiling of bacterial DNA in faecal samples. The three studies described here, exemplify the use of such techniques and future analyses with shotgun metagenomic sequencing will provide higher-resolution analysis of complex microbiome samples, including insight in microbial gene functions and strain-level identification of microbes.

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Should you wish to discuss the above, please contact Guus Kortman, Gut Microbiology and Nutrition Scientist, or Business Development Manager Ioana Iorga.

1. Switzerland:

• Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich.
• Health Systems Support Unit, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel.

2. Kenya:

• International Center for Behavioural Studies, Mombasa.
• Department of Food, Technology and Nutrition, University of Nairobi, Nairobi.
• Department of Medical Epidemiology, College of Health Sciences, Jomo KenyattaUniversity of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi.

3. South Africa:

• University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.

4. The Netherlands:

• Department of Laboratory Medicine, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen.
• NIZO, Ede