Babies, bugs and brains

How our early life microbiome associates with infant brain and behaviour development

In a new paper from Canada, scientists at the University of British Columbia looked into links between the gut microbiome and brain development of babies. 

It’s not trivial to study these types of interactions, as you might imagine. So for this small pilot study, scientists collected poo samples from 56 infants, aged between four and six months, and used high definition shotgun metagenomic sequencing to analyse the babies’ microbiomes. 

To find out if there were links between the composition of the gut microbiome and how developed the infant brains were, they used something called the behavioural point and gaze test. This is a well-known test of brain development, where an examiner points to various toys and then looks at them, and measures whether the baby follows the examiner’s gaze or not. 

Some of the babies also took part in a couple of other tests that looked at language discrimination and something called neural rhythm tracking.