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The Isala project’s empowered new insights into the vaginal microbiome and women’s health

Nature Microbiology volume 8, pages 1946–1947 (2023)Cite this article

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Empowering women through citizen science, from using self-collected vaginal samples to participant input on research questions, we decoded nuances in the composition of the vaginal microbiota — thereby linking female health and lifestyle to vaginal microbiota diversity. We crafted a unique dataset that should inspire new diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities.

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Fig. 1: The Isala citizen-science project.

References

  1. France, M. T. et al. VALENCIA: a nearest centroid classification method for vaginal microbial communities based on composition. Microbiome 8, 166 (2020). This paper reports the VALENCIA method and dataset, which was used to validate the modules identified in our Isala dataset.

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  2. Serrano, M. G. et al. Racioethnic diversity in the dynamics of the vaginal microbiome during pregnancy. Nat. Med. 25, 1001–1011 (2019). This paper reports the VaHMP dataset that was used to validate the modules identified in our Isala dataset.

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  3. Constitution of the World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2006); https://go.nature.com/48trXaOThis document provides the WHO definition of health.

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This is a summary of: Lebeer, S. et al. A citizen-science-enabled catalogue of the vaginal microbiome and associated factors. Nat. Microbiol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01500-0 (2023).

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The Isala project’s empowered new insights into the vaginal microbiome and women’s health. Nat Microbiol 8, 1946–1947 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01506-8

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