The bacteria in the human vagina have an important role in maintaining general health and protecting host from pathogenic microbes. Our knowledge about vaginal microbiota and its complexity has expanded vastly after development of novel culture-independent methods. Yet the big picture of vaginal microbiota remains the same as when Döderlein first found Lactobacillus from vagina.
In recent studies, the human papilloma virus (HPV) infection and its clearance rate been linked with vaginal microbiota type and bacterial vaginosis (BV) [1,2]. This emphasizes the need for better understanding of the function of different microbiota types and their interplay with the host.
We sampled 50 healthy Finnish women during routine Pap smear screening for cervical cancer in Helsinki, Finland. We collected an extensive background questionnaire and swabs for microbiota and HPV analysis. The Pap smears were reanalyzed to classify microbiota features visible to microscope. For bacterial community profiling, we used Illumina HiSeq platform to sequence hypervariable V3-4 regions of the 16S rRNA gene. For estimation of different strains among observed species we used minimum entropy decomposition (MED) [3] and oligotyping [4] and for functional analysis we used PICRUST [5] and other similar methods.
We have just started to analyze the data. The preliminary analysis identified interesting associations between the microbiota, socioeconomic factors and on the other hand between the Pap smear microscopy and sequencing. The results and conclusions will be presented at the conference.
[1] Brotman, R. M., Shardell, M. D., Gajer, P., Tracy, J. K., Zenilman, J. M., Ravel, J., & Gravitt, P. E. (2014). Interplay between the temporal dynamics of the vaginal microbiota and human papillomavirus detection. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 210(11), 1723–1733. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiu330
[2] Kero, K., Rautava, J., Syrjänen, K., Grenman, S., & Syrjänen, S. (2017). Association of asymptomatic bacterial vaginosis with persistence of female genital human papillomavirus infection. European Journal of Clinical Microbiology {&} Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-017-3048-y
[3] Eren, A. M., Morrison, H. G., Lescault, P. J., Reveillaud, J., Vineis, J. H., & Sogin, M. L. (2014). Minimum entropy decomposition : Unsupervised oligotyping for sensitive partitioning of high- throughput marker gene sequences. Isme J, 9(4), 968–979. https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2014.195
[4] Eren, a. M., Maignien, L., Sul, W. J., Murphy, L. G., Grim, S. L., Morrison, H. G., & Sogin, M. L. (2013). Oligotyping: differentiating between closely related microbial taxa using 16S rRNA gene data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 4(12), 1111–1119. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12114
[5] Langille, M. G. I., Zaneveld, J., Caporaso, J. G., McDonald, D., Knights, D., Reyes, J. a, … Huttenhower, C. (2013). Predictive functional profiling of microbial communities using 16S rRNA marker gene sequences. Nature Biotechnology, 31, 814–21. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2676