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ABSTRACT: Background
The composition of the microbiome plays an important role in human health and disease. Whether there is a direct association between the cervicovaginal microbiome and the host's epigenome is largely unexplored.Results
Here we analyzed a total of 448 cervicovaginal smear samples and studied both the DNA methylome of the host and the microbiome using the Illumina EPIC array and next-generation sequencing, respectively. We found that those CpGs that are hypo-methylated in samples with non-lactobacilli (O-type) dominating communities are strongly associated with gastrointestinal differentiation and that a signature consisting of 819 CpGs was able to discriminate lactobacilli-dominating (L-type) from O-type samples with an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.84 (95% CI = 0.77-0.90) in an independent validation set. The performance found in samples with more than 50% epithelial cells was further improved (AUC 0.87) and in women younger than 50 years of age was even higher (AUC 0.91). In a subset of 96 women, the buccal but not the blood cell DNA showed the same trend as the cervicovaginal samples in discriminating women with L- from O-type cervicovaginal communities.Conclusions
These findings strongly support the view that the epithelial epigenome plays an essential role in hosting specific microbial communities.
SUBMITTER: Nene NR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7686703 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Nené Nuno R NR Barrett James J Jones Allison A Evans Iona I Reisel Daniel D Timms John F JF Paprotka Tobias T Leimbach Andreas A Franchi Dorella D Colombo Nicoletta N Bjørge Line L Zikan Michal M Cibula David D Widschwendter Martin M
Clinical epigenetics 20201123 1
<h4>Background</h4>The composition of the microbiome plays an important role in human health and disease. Whether there is a direct association between the cervicovaginal microbiome and the host's epigenome is largely unexplored.<h4>Results</h4>Here we analyzed a total of 448 cervicovaginal smear samples and studied both the DNA methylome of the host and the microbiome using the Illumina EPIC array and next-generation sequencing, respectively. We found that those CpGs that are hypo-methylated in ...[more]