An Insight into Vaginal Microbiome Techniques

Abstract

There is a unique microbial community in the female lower genital tract known as the vaginal microbiota, which varies in composition and density and provides significant benefits during pregnancy, reproductive cyclicity, healthy newborn delivery, protection from preterm birth, infections such as UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, and so on, and improves the efficacy of treatments for vaginal cancers. Methods: It is necessary to know how the vaginal microbiome is composed in order to make an accurate diagnosis of the diseases listed above. A microbiome’s members are difficult to classify, and the way microbial communities function and influence host–pathogen interactions are difficult to understand. More and more metagenomic studies are able to unravel such complexities due to advances in high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics. When it comes to vaginal microbiota research, we’ll be looking at the use of modern techniques and strategies that can be used to investigate variations in vaginal microbiota in order to detect diseases earlier, better treat vaginal disorders, and boost women’s health. Discussion: The discussed techniques and strategies may improve the treatment of vaginal disorders and may be beneficial for women’s overall health.

Optimal sampling and analysis methods for clinical diagnostics of vaginal microbiome

“…As a strength of the current study, with V4-targeted 16S amplicon sequencing analysis, it is possible to get an overview of the bacterial community composition of a clinical sample and further, in clinical studies identify profile-level differences between the groups and variation within groups [18,24]. Research work is time and money consuming.…”

“…Vaginal microbial composition is a potential future target for clinical diagnostics [10,20,24,[28][29][30]. However, the development of any diagnostic test in clinical microbiology requires straightforward and trustworthy sample-collection methods.…”

“…However, the NGS-based analysis is still quite a challenging and complex way to profile human microbiota samples since each step from sample collection to bioinformatics and final statistics affect the final results [17][18][19][20][21]. Further, this research field still lacks the so-called golden standards and the variety of utilized methods for example in sample collection and DNA extraction combined with diverse reporting practices make replication of studies and assessing their quality challenging [17,[22][23][24]. Thus, it is of outmost importance to enhance and optimize the sampling and NGS analysis procedures.…”

“…Thus, it is of outmost importance to enhance and optimize the sampling and NGS analysis procedures. These optimized procedures will improve the diagnostics, treatment, and prevention of dysbiosis and infections affecting women's health [18,24].…”

High-Throughput Sequencing-Based Analysis of Changes in the Vaginal Microbiome during the Disease Course of Patients with Bacterial Vaginosis: A Case–Control Study

“…In bacterial vaginosis (BV), the characteristics of vaginal microbiota are highly complex. Next-generation sequencing techniques have been widely used for the detection of pathogenic microbes [ 14 ]. In the present study, we used 16S rRNA gene sequencing to investigate the vaginal microbiome of patients with BV.…”