Fig 1.
Flow chart of number of specimens assessed according to sexual activity categories at enrolment and over the study duration.
Total specimens = 184. At least one act of penile-vaginal sex had to be unprotected (no condoms used) to be selected for the applicable categories. aincludes women engaging in digital or receptive oral sex or 100% condom use for penile-vaginal sex in addition to these practices; bthe number of specimens shown for each category of sexual activity are from women who remained static within a category or progressed to a new category.
Table 1.
Demographic characteristics among 52 selected participants stratified according to their sexual activity category at enrolment.
Fig 2.
Heat map depicting vaginal bacterial communities analysed in this study.
Heat map of proportions of bacterial taxa identified from 184 specimens from 52 participants. Values are expressed as arcsine transformed relative abundances. Nugent score categories and sexual activity categories for each specimen are indicated. Community state type (CST) groupings shown based on previous literature [4, 6, 16], where CST I aligns with specimens dominated by Lactobacillus crispatus, CST II with specimens dominated by L. gasseri, CST III with specimens dominated by L. iners, CST IV with specimens dominated by G. vaginalis and CST V with specimens dominated by L. jensenii. CST VI represents specimens dominated by other heterogeneous non-lactobacilli (predominantly Atopobium vaginae and Prevotella spp.) and CST VII specimens dominated by Bifidobacterium breve.
Table 2.
Multinomial logistic regression of factors associated with having a vaginal microbiome dominated by different bacterial species.
Fig 3.
Distribution of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity scores for specimens dominated by one of five species groups.
Bray-Curtis dissimilarity scores were calculated between consecutive paired longitudinal samples over multiple time points from each participant (i.e. enrolment specimen [reference] vs month 3, month 3 [reference] vs month 6 etc.). Boxplots demonstrate the distribution of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity values (box = interquartile range; black line in box = median value; T bars = range of values) for each reference specimen dominated by Lactobacillus crispatus (LC), L. iners (LI), other Lactobacillus spp. (L. gasseri or L. jensenii; LG/LJ), Gardnerella vaginalis (GV), or other heterogeneous non-lactobacillus spp. (primarily Atopobium vaginae and Prevotella spp.; ONL).
Table 3.
Bacterial consistency determined by Bray-Curtis dissimilarity scores between consecutive pairs of specimens.
Table 4.
Gardnerella vaginalis clade distribution according to sexual activity category or BV status (N = 65 specimens, 32 women).