The Human Colostrum microbiota and Auto-Contractive Maps: a new tool for the metagenomics data analysis

Human colostrum is a complex and valuable food since it contains a large amount of commensal bacteria fundamental for the newborn ’s health 1,2. The aim of the present study was to explore the colostrum microbiota network using a metagenomics approach and the Auto Contractive Map (AutoCM), a new methodology based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) 3. Our results showed that the microbiota of colostrum is a complex ecosystem whose bacteria network changes depending on the mode of delivery. The colostrum microbiota of vaginal delivery group is characterized by a bacterial network with numerous bacterial connections, in which the central nodes were Achromobacter spp. and Rhodanobacter spp. Differently, Ruminococcus spp. and Pepeptostreptococcus spp. were the central nodes of colostrum microbiota collected from mothers who underwent a Caesarean delivery. Furthermore, it showed a less number of connections despite it contained a higher abundance of bacterial genera if compared to the natural delivery colostrum. In conclusion, we demonstrated that AutoCM may be a new analytic tool able to build up a predictive model useful for the analysis of metagenomics data.