Probiotics are emerging tools used by neonatal intensive care units to promote healthy outcomes and prevent intestinal diseases such as necrotizing enterocolitis. Probiotic treatment often includes the administration of bacterial strains that belong to the Bifidobacterium genus. Bifidobacterium strains are especially abundant in the guts of children — particularly children who are breastfed — and are considered beneficial to human health.

Scientists have sought to use probiotics to deliver the benefits of Bifidobacterium to infants suffering from malnutrition. Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys and and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine, Sabanci University and the University of California San Diego published findings July 16, 2025, in Nature Microbiology demonstrating the ability to predict the nutritional adaptations of Bifidobacterium strains by analyzing the distribution of hundreds of metabolic genes in thousands of Bifidobacterium genomes.