Antioxidant properties of breast milk in a Caco-2BBE/HT29-MTX cell culture model

There is good evidence to suggest that human breast milk has antioxidant properties. Our primary goal is to investigate the effects of antioxidant properties of human milk on the neonatal gut.; An in vitro digestion model, which incorporates both gastric and intestinal phases, was developed. To model the human intestinal mucosa, Caco-2BBE cells and HT29-MTX cells were co-cultured on diluted Matrigel. After the addition of exogenous mucin, the co-culture was able to maintain its characteristics after 30-minute digested milk treatment.; Two relatively non-selective, oxidant-sensitive dyes revealed that both milk and digested milk alleviated oxidative stress in the co-culture. The comet assay, in contrast, indicated that in vitro-digested milk exhibited less efficacy in reducing oxidative DNA damaged than milk, likely due to the compromise of antioxidant compounds during the in vitro digestion process. Our results conformed that the notion that breast milk reduces oxidative stress in a physiological system.