Milk protein osteopontin steers newborn microbiome to shape immune development

A study published in Cell by Howard et al. reports that osteopontin, a glycoprotein found in milk, shapes the neonatal microbiome in a way that regulates hematopoiesis. The work shows that this pathway promotes dendritic cell development and protects newborns from severe respiratory infection, linking maternal milk and the infant microbiota to early immune system development. The findings point to a nutrition-to-immunity pathway that may be relevant to long-term disease susceptibility. The study is newly published, and questions remain open about how the pathway operates in humans, which microbial components mediate the effect, and whether interventions targeting osteopontin or the microbiome could influence later disease risk.

Written by a model from the reports · updated 2 hours ago

Not enough continuous observation yet to draw a trend.