Bioactive glycans in a microbiome-directed food for children with malnutrition

Abstract Evidence is accumulating that perturbed postnatal development of the gut microbiome contributes to childhood malnutrition 1–4 . Here we analyse biospecimens from a randomized, controlled trial of a microbiome-directed complementary food (MDCF-2) that produced superior rates of weight gain compared with a calorically more dense conventional ready-to-use supplementary food in 12–18-month-old Bangladeshi children with moderate acute malnutrition 4 . We reconstructed 1,000 bacterial genomes (metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)) from the faecal microbiomes of trial participants, identified 75 MAGs of which the abundances were positively associated with ponderal growth (change in weight-for-length Z score (WLZ)), characterized changes in MAG gene expression as a function of treatment type and WLZ response, and quantified carbohydrate structures in MDCF-2 and faeces. The results reveal…