Introduction
PRETERM BIRTH
Preterm birth, defined as delivery prior to 37 weeks of gestation, affects approximately 10% of pregnancies worldwide and is the leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality.The compositional development of the gut microbiome of vaginally delivered full-term and breastfed children has been relatively well characterized while in the preterm counterpart, our understanding of the early stepwise microbiome establishment process remains incomplete.With these gaps in knowledge in mind, we prospectively characterized through metagenomic sequencing the compositional development of the gut microbiome of moderate and late preterm children during the first year of life and made comparisons with those of the full-term infants who remained healthy long-term, focusing on species composition and functional potential. We investigated whether the administration of specific probiotics or prebiotics might modulate the gut microbiome composition in moderate and late preterm infants and achieve colonization patterns resembling those in infants born full-term.