Unique Vaginal Microbiota That Includes an Unknown Mycoplasma-Like Organism Is Associated With Trichomonas vaginalis Infection
Open Access
- 12 March 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in The Journal of Infectious Diseases
- Vol. 207 (12), 1922-1931
- https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jit100
Abstract
Background. The prevalence of Trichomonas vaginalis infection is highest in women with intermediate Nugent scores. We hypothesized that the vaginal microbiota in T. vaginalis–infected women differs from that in T. vaginalis–uninfected women. Methods. Vaginal samples from 30 T. vaginalis–infected women were matched by Nugent score to those from 30 T. vaginalis–uninfected women. Equal numbers of women with Nugent scores categorized as normal, intermediate, and bacterial vaginosis were included. The vaginal microbiota was assessed using 454 pyrosequencing analysis of polymerase chain reaction–amplified 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences. The 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence of an unknown organism was obtained by universal bacterial polymerase chain reaction amplification, cloning, and sequencing. Results. Principal coordinates analysis of the pyrosequencing data showed divergence of the vaginal microbiota in T. vaginalis–infected and T. vaginalis–uninfected patients among women with normal and those with intermediate Nugent scores but not among women with bacterial vaginosis. Cluster analysis revealed 2 unique groups of T. vaginalis–infected women. One had high abundance of Mycoplasma hominis and other had high abundance of an unknown Mycoplasma species. Women in the former group had clinical evidence of enhanced vaginal inflammation. Conclusions. T. vaginalis may alter the vaginal microbiota in a manner that is favorable to its survival and/or transmissibility. An unknown Mycoplasma species plays a role in some of these transformations. In other cases, these changes may result in a heightened host inflammatory response.Keywords
This publication has 50 references indexed in Scilit:
- Characterization of bovine ruminal epithelial bacterial communities using 16S rRNA sequencing, PCR-DGGE, and qRT-PCR analysisVeterinary Microbiology, 2012
- Bacterial Vaginosis and Risk for Trichomonas vaginalis Infection: A Longitudinal AnalysisSexually Transmitted Diseases, 2011
- Bacterial Vaginosis Assessed by Gram Stain and Diminished Colonization Resistance to Incident Gonococcal, Chlamydial, and Trichomonal Genital InfectionThe Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2010
- Arginine metabolism in Trichomonas vaginalis infected with Mycoplasma hominisMicrobiology, 2010
- Search and clustering orders of magnitude faster than BLASTBioinformatics, 2010
- Vaginal microbiome of reproductive-age womenProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing dataNature Methods, 2010
- PyNAST: a flexible tool for aligning sequences to a template alignmentBioinformatics, 2009
- Naïve Bayesian Classifier for Rapid Assignment of rRNA Sequences into the New Bacterial TaxonomyApplied and Environmental Microbiology, 2007
- Non‐parametric multivariate analyses of changes in community structureAustralian Journal of Ecology, 1993