Fig. 1

Breast feeding (BF) enhanced gluconeogenesis in infants from both animal models and humans. A Overview of animal studies investigating the impacts of BF on the offspring’s metabolisms. B Overview of the critical steps of gluconeogenesis pathway and the expression of critical genes involved in BF (red) versus formula feeding (FF, blue) infants’ intestinal cells. Statistical significance was achieved in both unpaired t-test and Wilcoxon test. PCK2, false discovery rate (FDR) = 0.12; G6PC, FDR = 0.07. Solid lines in the violin plots denote the median expression level and the dashed lines are for the upper and lower quantiles. C Gluconeogenesis gene set scores of BF (red) and FF (blue) samples based on the 35 genes from the “Reactome Gluconeogenesis” gene set. Statistical significance was achieved in both unpaired t-test and Wilcoxon test. D Heatmap overview of the expression pattern of the genes from the “Reactine Gluconeogenesis” gene set in BF (left) and FF (right) samples. E Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) showed the enrichment of genes involved in gluconeogenesis pathways in BF (red) infants’ intestinal cells. F Scattering plots for the normalized abundance of the corresponding pathways predicted from microbiota analysis comparing BF (round dot) and FF (square dot) infants. No difference was detected (n.s., no significant change; PCK1, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase 1, PCK2, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase 2, FBP1, fructose bisphosphatase 1, G6PC, glucose 6 phosphatase, CPT1A, carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1, FASN, fatty acid synthase, SCD, stearoyl-CoA desaturase, CYP51, cholesterogenic lanosterol 14alpha-demethylase, PC, pyruvate carboxylase, NES, normalized enrichment score, FDR, false discovery rate)