A healthy early-life gut microbiota plays an important role in maintaining immediate and long-term health. Perturbations, particularly in low- to middle-income communities, are associated with increased infection risk. Thus, a promising avenue for restoring a healthy infant microbiota is to select key beneficial bacterial candidates from underexplored microbiomes for developing new probiotic-based therapies. This study aimed to recover bifidobacteria and lactic acid bacteria from the faeces of healthy Cameroonian infants and unravel the genetic basis of their beneficial properties. Faecal samples were collected from 26 infants aged 0-5 months recruited in Dschang (Cameroon). Recovered bacterial isolates were subjected to whole-genome sequencing and