Publications by authors named "Randall C Robinson"

Human milk provides bioactive compounds such as milk fat globules (MFGs), which promote brain development, modulate the immune system, and hold antimicrobial properties. To ensure microbiological safety, donor milk banks apply heat treatments. This study compares the effects of heat treatments and homogenization on MFG's physicochemical properties, bioactivity, and bioavailability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - This study highlights that food oligosaccharides can unexpectedly degrade during common glycomics processes like sample prep and LC-MS analysis, particularly due to heat and acid exposure
  • - Four key oligosaccharides were tested, showing significant degradation during APTS-labeling and centrifugal evaporation, as well as during LC-MS analysis when acid was present in the eluent
  • - The research also proposes a straightforward method to minimize misidentification of oligosaccharides caused by extensive degradation during the analysis phase
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Reverse-phase solid-phase extraction (SPE) is regularly used for separating and purifying food-derived oligosaccharides and peptides prior to liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis. However, the diversity in physicochemical properties of peptides may prevent the complete separation of the two types of analytes. Peptides present in the oligosaccharide fraction not only interfere with glycomics analysis but also escape peptidomics analysis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are indigestible carbohydrates with prebiotic, pathogen decoy and immunomodulatory activities that are theorized to substantially impact infant health. The objective of this study was to monitor HMO concentrations over 1 year to develop a long-term longitudinal dataset. HMO concentrations in the breast milk of healthy lactating mothers of the Cambridge Baby Growth and Breastfeeding Study (CBGS-BF) were measured at birth, 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months postpartum.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aside from their amino acid content, dairy proteins are valuable for their ability to carry encrypted bioactive peptides whose activities are latent until released by digestive enzymes or endogenous enzymes within the food. Peptides can possess a wide variety of functionalities, such as antibacterial, antihypertensive, and antioxidative properties, as demonstrated by in vitro and in vivo studies. This phenomenon raises the question as to what impact various traditional cheese-making processes have on the formation of bioactive peptides in the resulting products.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Peptidomics and glycomics are recently established disciplines enabling researchers to characterize functional characteristics of foods at a molecular level. Milk-derived bioactive peptides and oligosaccharides have garnered both scientific and commercial interest because they possess unique functional properties, such as anti-hypertensive, immunomodulatory and prebiotic activities; therefore, the objective of this work was to employ peptidomic and glycomic tools to identify and measure relative and absolute quantities of peptides and oligosaccharides in widely consumed dairy products. Specifically, we identified up to 2117 unique peptides in 10 commercial dairy products, which together represent the most comprehensive peptidomic profiling of dairy milk in the literature to date.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Human milk oligosaccharides (OS) play a key role in brain and gut microbiota development of the neonate, but the underlying biosynthetic steps of OS in the mammary gland are still largely unknown. As bovine milk contains OS with somewhat similar structures and functionalities there is increased interest in further understanding the genetic basis underlying the OS content of milk for eventual extraction and generation of value-added ingredients for infant formulas and nutraceuticals. The present study is the first to report on genetic parameter estimation as well as on a genome wide association study (GWAS) from the largest bovine milk OS dataset analyzed to date.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Among the many bioactive components in human milk, the free oligosaccharides (OS) have been intensely studied in recent decades due to their unique ability to selectively modulate the infant gut microbiota, in addition to providing numerous other health benefits. In light of the demonstrated value of these compounds, recent studies have set out to characterize the structures and properties of the similar and more widely-available OS in the dairy industry. This mini review gives a brief overview of the common analytical techniques used to characterize bovine milk OS and highlights several recent, key studies that have identified valuable physiological and metabolic effects of these molecules .

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Free milk oligosaccharides are bioactive molecules that function as prebiotics and prevent infections that commonly afflict developing infants. To date, few publications have examined the factors affecting bovine milk oligosaccharide production among cattle in the dairy industry. Here we have applied a high-throughput isobaric labeling technique to measure oligosaccharide abundances in milk collected from Danish Holstein-Friesian and Jersey dairy cattle by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Human milk is a dynamic protein-protease system that delivers bioactive peptides to infants. The pH of milk changes from the mother's mammary gland to the infant's digestive tract. Although the release of human milk peptides has been studied during in vivo or in vitro digestion, these models did not explicitly vary nor observe the effect of pH.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Milk oligosaccharides (OS) are bioactive molecules that impart a variety of health benefits to the consumer. Techniques commonly used to analyse and quantify OS require optimised extraction methods to separate the OS from more abundant milk components. Solid phase extraction (SPE) is frequently used to isolate milk OS from lactose; however, the literature contains no formal studies on its efficacy in this application.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Milk oligosaccharides (OS) are a key factor that influences the infant gut microbial composition, and their importance in promoting healthy infant development and disease prevention is becoming increasingly apparent. Investigating the structures, properties, and sources of these compounds requires a host of complementary analytical techniques. Relative compound quantification by mass spectral analysis of isobarically labeled samples is a relatively new technique that has been used mainly in the proteomics field.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Human milk is a unique and complex fluid that provides infant nutrition and delivers an array of bioactive molecules that serve various functions. Glycans, abundant in milk, can be found as free oligosaccharides or as glycoconjugates. Milk glycans are increasingly linked to beneficial outcomes in neonates through protection from pathogens and modulation of the immune system.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sodium caseinate hydrolysates (NaCaH) contain biologically active peptides that can positively influence human health. However, their intense bitterness hinders their inclusion in food products. To our knowledge, no studies have investigated whether a correlation between bitterness and bioactivity exists in NaCaH, so it is not yet known what effect selective removal of bitterness has on NaCaH bioactivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Exclusively breast-fed infants can exhibit clear signs of IgE or non IgE-mediated cow's milk allergy. However, the definite characterization of dietary cow's milk proteins (CMP) that survive the maternal digestive tract to be absorbed into the bloodstream and secreted into breast milk remains missing. Herein, we aimed at assessing possible CMP-derived peptides in breast milk.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Scope: The microorganisms that make up kefir grains are well known for lactose fermentation, but the extent to which they hydrolyze and consume milk proteins remains poorly understood. Peptidomics technologies were used to examine the proteolytic activity of kefir grains on bovine milk proteins.

Methods And Results: Gel electrophoresis revealed substantial digestion of milk proteins by kefir grains, with mass spectrometric analysis showing the release of 609 protein fragments and alteration of the abundance of >1500 peptides that derived from 27 milk proteins.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Hundreds of naturally occurring milk peptides are present in term human milk. Preterm milk is produced before complete maturation of the mammary gland, which could change milk synthesis and secretion processes within the mammary gland, leading to differences in protein expression and enzymatic activity, thereby resulting in an altered peptide profile.

Objective: This study examined differences in peptides present between milk from women delivering at term and women delivering prematurely.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Peptidomics focuses on the study of naturally occurring protein fragments, or peptides, in the body, which can have both positive and negative effects.
  • - The review highlights the use of peptidomics in digestion research, identifying functional peptides, and discovering biomarkers, alongside various extraction and detection methods, including mass spectrometry (MS).
  • - It also compares algorithms for peptide sequence determination and discusses techniques for analyzing peptide functions, structures, and statistical data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF