Cross-species proteomic and microRNA comparison of extracellular vesicles in human milk, cows milk, and infant formula products: moving towards next generation infant formula products

• Published in: bioRxiv
• Main Authors: Turner, Natalie P, Abeysinghe, Pevindu, Sadowski, Pawel, Mitchell, Murray D
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 24.02.2023
• Subjects: Baby foods; Breast milk; Cow's milk; Extracellular vesicles; Infants; Mass spectroscopy; MicroRNAs; Milk products; miRNA; Proteins; Proteomics; Transcriptomics
• DOI: 10.1101/2023.02.23.529810

Milk and milk products such as infant formula (IF) play a fundamental role in serving the nutritional needs of the developing infant. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) in human (HM) and cows milk (CM) contain molecular cargo such as proteins and micro(mi)RNA that serve as functional messengers between cells and may be of importance to infant health. Here, we have developed a pipeline using advanced proteomics and transcriptomics to enable cross-species comparison of milk and IF EVs. EVs from HM, CM and IF were subjected to data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry and RNA-seq. Differentially abundant proteins (143) and miRNAs (514) were identified in HM and CM EVs, and CM EV proteins and miRNAs were preserved in IF EVs (~20% protein; ~90% miRNA). We foresee this work to be used in large scale studies to determine biologically relevant species-specific differences in milk EVs that could be leveraged to improve IF products.Competing Interest StatementMurray D. Mitchell reports financial support was provided by Reckitt Benckiser/Mead Johnson Nutrition.Footnotes* http://evtrack.org/review.php