Plant-based human milk compounds

Over 200 different carbohydrates in human milk help form a composition of nutrients suited to feeding a growing child. Yet roughly 75% of infants around the world don't get their nutrition solely from human milk. Many get part or all of their nutrition from infant formula , which may contain only one or two of those important carbohydrates, if any. Now researchers publishing in Nature Food describe how plants can be modified to produce a diverse array of these carbohydrates, called human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) (2024, DOI: 10.1038/s43016-024-00996-x ). Other methods for producing HMOs, including microbial fermentation, have existed for years . But according to Collin Barnum , a synthetic biologist formerly at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the paper, microbes are "only able to produce a small subset of HMOs [that is limited to] these kind of smaller, less complex HMOs." That's where plant production