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      The vaginal microbiome during pregnancy and the postpartum period in a European population

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          Abstract

          The composition and structure of the pregnancy vaginal microbiome may influence susceptibility to adverse pregnancy outcomes. Studies on the pregnant vaginal microbiome have largely been limited to Northern American populations. Using MiSeq sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons, we characterised the vaginal microbiota of a mixed British cohort of women (n = 42) who experienced uncomplicated term delivery and who were sampled longitudinally throughout pregnancy (8–12, 20–22, 28–30 and 34–36 weeks gestation) and 6 weeks postpartum. We show that vaginal microbiome composition dramatically changes postpartum to become less Lactobacillus spp. dominant with increased alpha-diversity irrespective of the community structure during pregnancy and independent of ethnicity. While the pregnancy vaginal microbiome was characteristically dominated by Lactobacillus spp. and low alpha-diversity, unlike Northern American populations, a significant number of pregnant women this British population had a L. jensenii-dominated microbiome characterised by low alpha-diversity. L. jensenii was predominantly observed in women of Asian and Caucasian ethnicity whereas L. gasseri was absent in samples from Black women. This study reveals new insights into biogeographical and ethnic effects upon the pregnancy and postpartum vaginal microbiome and has important implications for future studies exploring relationships between the vaginal microbiome, host health and pregnancy outcomes.

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          Temporal dynamics of the human vaginal microbiota.

          Elucidating the factors that impinge on the stability of bacterial communities in the vagina may help in predicting the risk of diseases that affect women's health. Here, we describe the temporal dynamics of the composition of vaginal bacterial communities in 32 reproductive-age women over a 16-week period. The analysis revealed the dynamics of five major classes of bacterial communities and showed that some communities change markedly over short time periods, whereas others are relatively stable. Modeling community stability using new quantitative measures indicates that deviation from stability correlates with time in the menstrual cycle, bacterial community composition, and sexual activity. The women studied are healthy; thus, it appears that neither variation in community composition per se nor higher levels of observed diversity (co-dominance) are necessarily indicative of dysbiosis.
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            The generalisation of student's problems when several different population variances are involved.

            B L WELCH (1947)
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              Original Articles: Ecological Resilience, Biodiversity, and Scale

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                11 March 2015
                2015
                : 5
                : 8988
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Imperial College Parturition Research Group, Division of the Institute of Reproduction and Developmental Biology, Imperial College London , UK
                [2 ]School of Biosciences, Cardiff University , UK
                [3 ]Division of Cancer, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London , UK
                [4 ]Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Medicine, Imperial College London , UK
                [5 ]St Mary's Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust , London, UK
                [6 ]Section of Biomolecular Medicine, Division of Computational Systems Medicine, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London , UK
                [7 ]MRC NIHR National Phenome Centre, Division of Computational Systems Medicine, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London , UK
                Author notes
                Article
                srep08988
                10.1038/srep08988
                4355684
                25758319
                37397f22-984c-40fe-80e9-20690a3a87ce
                Copyright © 2015, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 17 November 2014
                : 11 February 2015
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