Gene Expression Modulation in Cancer Cells Treated With Breast Milk–derived Microbial Metabolites: a Qpcr-Based Mechanistic Study

Breast milk contains diverse microbial communities capable of producing bioactive metabolites with therapeutic potential. The literature on cancer biology is mostly focused on cell viability or identification of probiotics and lacks much understanding of the mechanism at a gene expression scale. The present research presents a Gene Expression Modulation Mechanism methodology to analyze the impact of the breast milk–derived microbial metabolites on the regulation of cancer-related genes. Bacterial cell-free supernatants were given to the cancer cells and then inflammatory, metabolic, and apoptotic gene expression was determined using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). The findings showed significant upregulation of apoptotic markers, including Caspase-3 and Caspase-7, with fold changes greater than 2, together with downregulation of inflammatory regulators, including tumor necrosis factor alpha, below 0.5-fold. Relative to other studies that have shown small transcriptional changes, genome-wide regulation with stronger pathway-level changes is observed. The results suggest that microbial metabolites repress tumor-promoting inflammation and metabolism and trigger programmed death. In sum, this study presents experimental mechanistic data to confirm that microbial metabolites found in breast milk are potential anticancer bioactives.