Bacterial Populations in the Vaginas of Healthy Adolescent Women

Abstract

Given that the microbiota of the healthy vagina plays an important role in the maintenance of health, it follows that an understanding of its composition and development may offer insights into the etiology and prevention of disease. In contrast to previous studies, this study exclusively investigated the structure and composition of adolescent vaginal bacterial communities. In this report, the vaginal bacterial communities of 90 menarcheal adolescents, ages 13–18y, were characterized using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (T-RFLP) of 16S rRNA genes. Further characterization involved cluster analysis of the T-RFLP data to identify the number of different kinds of microbial communities found among the adolescents sampled, and phylogenetic analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences cloned from samples representative of each cluster. We report the identification of four major clusters that accounted for 96.7% of the cohort. In general, these clusters could be divided into those dominated by Lactobacillus spp. and those dominated by a variety of lactic acid producing, anaerobic bacterial types such as Atopobium vaginae and Streptococcus spp. The compositional and structural similarity of the vaginal microbiota of menarcheal adolescents and adults suggests that the vaginal microbiota does not change significantly after the onset of menarche.