<i>Prevotella copri</i> -related effects of a therapeutic food for malnutrition

Preclinical and clinical studies are providing evidence that the healthy growth of infants and children reflects, in part, healthy development of their gut microbiomes 1–5 . This process of microbial community assembly and functional maturation is perturbed in children with acute malnutrition. Gnotobiotic animals, colonized with microbial communities from children with severe and moderate acute malnutrition, have been used to develop microbiome-directed complementary food (MDCF) formulations for repairing the microbiomes of these children during the weaning period 5 . Bangladeshi children with moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) participating in a previously reported 3-month-long randomized controlled clinical study of one such formulation, MDCF-2, exhibited significantly improved weight gain compared to a commonly used nutritional intervention despite the lower caloric density of the…