The Journal of Theoretical Fimpology. Volume 2, Issue 2: e-20120718-2-2-11. August 19, 2014 (www.fimpology.com)
Bacteria, Viruses, Membrane-Enclosed Microentities, and Fungi as the Environmental Evolutionary Entities Coexisting in Human Milk
Shu-dong Yin
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8661-6889
Cory H. E. R. & C. Inc., Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Traditionally, our understanding on the benefit of human milk and breastfeeding focuses on their nutrition and immunology: (i) breastmilk, as the natural food of newborns, offers various essential nutrients including carbohydrates, lipids and proteins for the growth and development of suckling offspring; (ii) from the immunological perspective, breastmilk acts as a vector to transfer acquired and innate immune defense factors including eukaryotic cellular entities and molecular entities from maternal body to suckling babies; and (iii) breastfeeding is the perquisite for cashing the above nutritional and immunological values for offspring. Recently, in the fimpological UPOEE model, [1,2] a novel concept called 'Evolutionary Background Entities, EBE' was proposed for referring to those entities of the lower evolutionary levels which are the evolutionary 'background organisms' of the entities at the higher evolutionary levels. [1,2] In the most recent paper,[2] the following notion has been proposed: (i) animals are not only inhabitants of natural habitats, but also are the 'niches' or 'habitats' of evolutionary micro-entities including bacteria, viruses and fungi; and (ii) the interaction between an evolutionary entity and its environment is actually the interaction between the entity and its environmental evolutionary entities at the same and/or different evolutionary levels. As the natural food, milk is one of primary environmental factors, which mammalian newborns have to contact for survival; and therefore, from the fimpological perspective, it's necessary to answer the question: what are the environmental evolutionary entities in human milk? In this paper, the author tries to review the physiological and pathological roles of prokaryotic bacterial cells, viruses, eukaryotic fungal cells, and membrane-enclosed microentities as the environmental evolutionary entities in human milk, and expects that a clear viral and fungal profile in normal human milk will be accomplished in the near future.