Seal pups may be nursing on what amounts to a biochemical powerhouse—and it could someday end up in baby formula. In a new study, researchers found that milk from gray seals contains roughly a third more distinct sugar molecules than human breast milk, and many of those sugars have never been seen before, per Phys.org. The milk is "extraordinary," says Daniel Bojar of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, lead author of the study in Nature Communications.
The research suggests that some of these new sugar molecules could someday be added to human infant formula to boost infants' immune systems, or perhaps to adults to keep their gastrointestinal systems healthy. As the New York Times explains, milk has fat and protein, along with different sugars. Longer chains of sugars are called oligosaccharides, and these are key players in early-life health across mammals, helping shape gut microbes, strengthen the intestinal tract, and block invading viruses and bacteria.
The researchers followed five wild gray seals off Scotland for their full 17-day nursing period, repeatedly collecting milk and analyzing it with mass spectrometry and AI-driven tools. They found not only a broad variety of sugars, but also a shift in milk composition as pups aged, similar to how human milk changes. Specifically, researchers identified 332 separate sugar structures in seal milk, compared with about 250 known in human milk. Roughly two-thirds were previously unknown to science.
What's more, some of the newly spotted molecules are unusually large, with chains of 28 sugar units, far exceeding the 18-unit maximum known in breast milk. Tests on human immune cells suggest the newly identified seal-milk sugars can modulate immune responses and show strong activity against disease-causing bacteria. All in all, "the study highlights the untapped biomedical potential hidden in understudied wild species," says Bojar.
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