The intestinal microbiota, the “good bacteria,” in the infant’s gut play a crucial role in the maturation of the immune system. Alteration of microbiota during early life has been linked to later childhood diseases such as allergy, asthma and obesity. Thus, understanding the environmental determinants of infant microbiota is an important priority in child health research.

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The SyMBIOTA research program aims to investigate early life determinants in the development of the infant gut microbiota and how the developing microbiota and its metabolites influence later childhood disease, including allergy and obesity.

 

  

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SyMBIOTA employs AllerGen’s CHILD Cohort Study (www.childstudy.ca) as a research platform. Gut microbiota profiles of infants have been characterized from stool samples collected at 3 and 12 months using Illumina 16S rRNA sequencing of hypervariable region V4.