# Elucidating impacts of genetic variability of Bifidobacterium strains on preterm infant gut immune responses

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA RENO · 2021 · $72,750

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
The gastrointestinal tract of preterm infants plays a major role in overall infant nutrition, growth, and health.
Increasing interest by clinicians and researchers has uncovered relationships between the gut microbiome and
many of the primary causes of morbidity and mortality in preterm infants. To address these risks from the gut
microbiome, probiotics are an attractive and translatable approach to remodel the infant gut microbiome.
However, there is a strong need to understand the mechanism by which probiotic organisms act on the
preterm gut and with the gut ecosystem in order to guide the rational selection of probiotic organisms for use in
this patient population. In particular, there is a current lack of understanding as to how genomic variation
among probiotic organisms may, or may not, influence their relative efficacy and/or safety in vivo. The
proposed studies begin to address these issues by (1) examining the impact of genomic variations within a well
characterized infant gut symbiont, and frequent probiotic organism, B. infantis, on ecological performance in in
vitro competition models and then (2) how these variations affect the preterm gut epithelium in an epithelial cell
line that closely mimics the cells found in the preterm infant gut. Together, these experiments seek to
understand how diet (i.e. human milk), a probiotic gut symbiont (B. infantis), and the preterm host interact in
terms of both transcriptional responses and host immune, proliferative, and necroptotic responses.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10283837
- **Project number:** 1R03HD105881-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA RENO
- **Principal Investigator:** Steven Frese
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $72,750
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-07-30 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10283837

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10283837, Elucidating impacts of genetic variability of Bifidobacterium strains on preterm infant gut immune responses (1R03HD105881-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-12 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10283837. Licensed CC0.

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