Lactation and mother's milk: recent advances in understanding

Human milk has been shown to have a wide range of nutritional and immune protective benefits for the newborn and growing infant. Despite a reasonably good description of the composition of milk, our understanding of the role that each specific milk component plays in the infant is limited and many questions surround the mechanisms that regulate milk synthesis and orchestrate its assembly in the alveolar lumen. Here we illuminate some of the more pertinent topics that interest both the nutritionist and cell biologist, and, at the same time, introduce an interesting and powerful new tool being developed to investigate these same topics.