TY  - JOUR
A1  - Biehl, Lena Maria
A1  - Farowski, Fedja
A1  - Hilpert, Catharina
A1  - Nowag, Angela
A1  - Kretzschmar, Anne
A1  - Jazmati, Nathalie Rihab
A1  - Tsakmaklis, Anastasia
A1  - Wieters, Imke
A1  - Khodamoradi, Yascha
A1  - Wisplinghoff, Hilmar
A1  - Vehreschild, Maria J. G. T.
T1  - Longitudinal variability in the urinary microbiota of healthy premenopausal women and the relation to neighboring microbial communities: a pilot study
T2  - PLOS ONE
N2  - Background: The understanding of longitudinal changes in the urinary microbiota of healthy women and its relation to intestinal microbiota is limited.
Methods: From a cohort of 15 premenopausal women without known urogenital disease or current symptoms, we collected catheter urine (CU), vaginal and periurethral swabs, and fecal samples on four visits over six months. Additionally, ten participants provided CU and midstream urine (MU) to assess comparability. Urine was subjected to expanded culture. 16S rRNA gene sequencing was performed on all urine, fecal, and selected vaginal and periurethral samples. Sequence reads were processed (DADA2 pipeline) and analyzed using QIIME 2 and R.
Results: Relative abundances of urinary microbiota were variable over 6–18 months. The degree of intraindividual variability of urinary microbiota was higher than that found in fecal samples. Still, nearly half of the observed beta diversity of all urine samples could be attributed to differences between volunteers (R2 = 0.48, p = 0.001). After stratification by volunteer, time since last sexual intercourse was shown to be a factor significantly contributing to beta diversity (R2 = 0.14, p = 0.001). We observed a close relatedness of urogenital microbial habitats and a clear distinction from intestinal microbiota in the overall betadiversity analysis. Microbiota compositions derived from MU differed only slightly from CU compositions. Within this analysis of low-biomass samples, we identified contaminating sequences potentially stemming from sequencing reagents.
Conclusions: Results from our longitudinal cohort study confirmed the presence of a rather variable individual urinary microbiota in premenopausal women. These findings from catheter urine complement previous observations on temporal dynamics in voided urine. The higher intraindividual variability of urinary microbiota as compared to fecal microbiota will be a challenge for future studies investigating associations with urogenital diseases and aiming at identifying pathogenic microbiota signatures.
KW  - Microbiome
KW  - Gut bacteria
KW  - Urine
KW  - Gene sequencing
KW  - Ribosomal RNA
KW  - Antibiotics
KW  - Bacteria
KW  - Catheters
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62713
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627134
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Data Availability: The dataset generated and analyzed in this study is available in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under the BioProject accession number PRJNA649069.
N1  - Funding: This study was supported by a study grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG - https://www.dfg.de/), grant number BI 1899/1-1, awarded to Lena M. Biehl.
VL  - 17
IS  - 1, art. e0262095
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
PB  - PLOS
CY  - San Francisco, California, US
ER  -