Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology
Vaginal microbiota and functional prediction along the progression of cervical lesions in postmenopausal women
By Liu Y, Ma C, Quan L and 5 others.
Abstract
Objective
To investigate the changes in vaginal microbiota in postmenopausal women from Xinjiang, China, with high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, cervical squamous intraepithelial lesion, and cervical cancer (CC).
Methods
This study enrolled healthy postmenopausal women (HC group, n=25), postmenopausal women with high-risk HPV infection (HPV group, n=25), low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL group, n=25), high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL group, n=25), and cervical cancer (CC group, n=25). DNA was extracted from vaginal secretions, and full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing was performed on the Nanopore platform. The EasyAmplicon 2 pipeline was used for sequence processing and taxonomic annotation, PICRUSt2 was used for functional prediction, and R software was used for vaginal microbiota diversity and statistical analyses.