Abstract
Early-life microbiota has been linked to the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. It has been hypothesized that maternal vaginal microbiota is an important initial seeding source and therefore might have lifelong effects on disease risk. To understand maternal vaginal microbiota's role in seeding the child's microbiota and the extent of delivery mode-dependent transmission, we studied 665 mother-child dyads from the COPSAC2010 cohort. The maternal vaginal microbiota was evaluated twice in the third trimester and compared with the children's fecal (at 1 week, 1 month, and 1 year of age) and airway microbiota (at 1 week, 1 month, and 3 months). Based on the concept of weighted transfer ratios (WTRs), we have identified bacterial orders for which the WTR displays patterns indicate persistent or transient transfer from the maternal vaginal microbiome, as well as orders that are shared at later time points independent of delivery mode, indicating a common reservoir.
Highlights
The present study has characterized the vaginal microbiota of 665 Danish women during pregnancy and subsequently the microbiota of 651 children born by these women
community state types (CSTs) dominated by Gardnerella had higher alpha diversity and beta diversity dispersion than Lactobacillus-dominated CSTs, as seen in prior studies (Ravel et al, 2011; Ma and Li, 2017), while generally being less likely to be stable between week 24 and week 36 of pregnancy
Based on the two vaginal sampling times, we saw a high intraindividual similarity, with the median beta diversity distance between each woman’s own samples being 3.8–20.6 times smaller than the median distance to other women’s samples, for weighted UniFrac distances and Jensen–Shannon divergence, respectively, and we found that 85.5% of all women belonged to the same CST at both time points
Summary
Recent studies have suggested that transfer of bacteria from mother to infant during vaginal birth (Bokulich et al, 2016; Dominguez-Bello et al, 2016) is fundamental for the formation of the early infant microbiota and later disease risk: (1) Delivery mode affects the development of the microbiota in early life, and differences between the microbiota of infants delivered vaginally and by cesarean section (CS) have been identified as late as at 1 year of age (Azad et al, 2013; Backhed et al, 2015; Stokholm et al, 2016). (2) Such bacterial colonization in early life has been correlated with the risk of several chronic inflammatory disorders (Bisgaard et al, 2007; Bisgaard et al, 2008; Bisgaard et al, 2011; Stokholm et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2008), and (3) correlations have been observed between CS and increased risk of such diseases (Mueller et al, 2017; Sevelsted et al, 2015). Recent studies have suggested that transfer of bacteria from mother to infant during vaginal birth (Bokulich et al, 2016; Dominguez-Bello et al, 2016) is fundamental for the formation of the early infant microbiota and later disease risk: (1) Delivery mode affects the development of the microbiota in early life, and differences between the microbiota of infants delivered vaginally and by cesarean section (CS) have been identified as late as at 1 year of age (Azad et al, 2013; Backhed et al, 2015; Stokholm et al, 2016).
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