An international mammary gland study has found patterns in milk can give insight into how the lactating breast is functioning and how this relates to infant growth.
Professor Donna Geddes, Director of the Centre for Human Lactation Research and Translation at The University of Western Australia, was co-author of the study published in Science and conducted by the International Milk Composition Consortium.
The study compared milk from mothers in Canada, Pakistan and Burkina Faso using multi-omic profiling – a method of studying living things by looking at the interaction of multiple levels of biology at the same time rather than just looking at one piece – and computational approaches designed to identify biological patterns shared across diverse populations.
Researchers identified conserved molecular signatures linked with metabolism, barrier function and immune processes, and connected some of those signals with maternal nutritional status and infant growth.
“By examining molecular measurements across diverse populations, we identified shared patterns in human milk that provide a non-invasive window into mammary gland function,” Professor Geddes said.
“We identified molecular signatures associated with distinct aspects of mammary gland function, including metabolic activity, protective skin function and immune processes.”
Researchers found a small set of molecular features was consistently associated with both maternal nutritional status and infant growth, suggesting that milk composition captures biologically meaningful variation in mammary function.
“The lactating mammary gland has been relatively understudied in humans, despite its central role in infant nutrition,” Professor Geddes said.
“Our findings will enable further human lactation biology studies at scale without invasive sampling of mammary tissue and demonstrates the importance of examining milk in the context of mammary gland biology.”
The results provide new directions for understanding lactation biology and designing future interventions to support maternal nutrition, mammary function and infant growth.
Funded by the Gates Foundation, the International Milk Composition Consortium was created to study human milk as a complex biological system rather than as a simple collection of nutrients.