Journal: Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

Article Title: Population-level analyses identify host and environmental variables influencing the vaginal microbiome

doi: 10.1038/s41392-025-02152-8

Figure Lengend Snippet: Overview of the study and defining core vaginal microbiome in the VaMHP cohort. a 6755 individuals aged 19–64 years were recruited. Vaginal swabs with 81 time-matched variables from eight categories were collected. Wedge sizes in the ring chart reflect the proportion of collected variables in each category. b The phylogenetic tree constructed by the 274 representative sequences used in the study. The transparency of colors in the inner heatmap and the heights of bars in the outer ring correspond to the relative abundance of ASVs. The colors of bars in the outer ring represent the Phylum classification of microbes. The abundance of ASVs was transformed using a log 2 (count+1) function. c Relative abundances of top 13 taxa across all the individuals’ samples. Each sample is represented by one stacked bar. The bars for all samples were presented in the ascending order of relative abundance of Lactobacillus crispatus . “Others” refers to the remaining taxa. d The relative abundances of four core species that were observed in over 90% of the sampled participants. The abundances of the species were transformed by log 2 (count+1). e – h Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots based on Bray–Curtis distance. Each point represents a sample and is colored according to the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa

Article Snippet: Four of them are dominated by Lactobacillus spp. ( L. crispatus , CST I; L. gasseri , CST II; L. iners , CST III; L. jensenii , CST V) and one consisting of diverse strict and facultative anaerobes (CST IV).

Techniques: Construct, Transformation Assay

Journal: Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

Article Title: Population-level analyses identify host and environmental variables influencing the vaginal microbiome

doi: 10.1038/s41392-025-02152-8

Figure Lengend Snippet: The Vagitypes in the VaMHP cohort. a Assignment of vaginal Vagitypes based on 45 host or environment-associated microbial taxa. A total of 15 groups, 13 vaginal Vagitypes were identified. Marker taxa enriched in the specific Vagitype (determined by NMF) were in the same color. The boxplots indicate Shannon diversity in each Vagitype. The central line, box and whiskers of boxplots represent the median, interquartile range (IQR), and 1.5 times the IQR, respectively. b UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) plot presenting the distinct clustering of the Vagitypes in the VaMHP cohort and the proportion of each Vagitype. c , d Distribution of Vagitypes in women of different ages and age groups (<=45 vs. >45). e Validation of the Vagitypes defined from the VaMHP cohort in five independent populations. The similarity of each sample to its assigned Vagitype centroid was computed using Yue and Clayton’s θ index, a similarity measure based on relative abundances of shared and non-shared species (θ = 0: complete dissimilarity, θ = 1: identical communities). The similarity of each sample to its assigned Vagitype centroid in five validation cohorts is plotted as colored, normalized histograms and is compared to that of the VaMHP cohort (gray histogram). The Venn plot showed the shared and exclusive taxa between the taxa identified in the validated cohort and 45 taxa identified in the VaMHP cohort. f Microbial interactions of the 13 Vagitypes. The network was constructed by 45 identified host or environment-associated key microbial taxa. Microbial taxa are colored by modules obtained from the maximal greedy algorithm within each network. The size of each node is proportional to its relative abundance. Intra-module edges are colored by modules and inter-module edges are colored gray. The width of the lines reflects the strength of the sparCC correlations. g The relative abundance of four main Lactobacillus species, L. crispatus , L. iners, L. gasseri , and L. jensenii across the 13 Vagitypes. The horizontal dashed lines indicated the mean relative abundance of L. crispatus and L. iners . h The percentage of the positive correlations of the network in each Vagitype

Article Snippet: Four of them are dominated by Lactobacillus spp. ( L. crispatus , CST I; L. gasseri , CST II; L. iners , CST III; L. jensenii , CST V) and one consisting of diverse strict and facultative anaerobes (CST IV).

Techniques: Marker, Biomarker Discovery, Construct