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. 2022 Dec 13;23(24):15847.
doi: 10.3390/ijms232415847.

In-Silico Functional Metabolic Pathways Associated to Chlamydia trachomatis Genital Infection

Simone Filardo  1 , Marisa Di Pietro  1 , Marta De Angelis  1 , Gabriella Brandolino  2 , Maria Grazia Porpora  2 , Rosa Sessa  1
Affiliations

In-Silico Functional Metabolic Pathways Associated to Chlamydia trachomatis Genital Infection

Simone Filardo et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

The advent of high-throughput technologies, such as 16s rDNA sequencing, has significantly contributed to expanding our knowledge of the microbiota composition of the genital tract during infections such as Chlamydia trachomatis. The growing body of metagenomic data can be further exploited to provide a functional characterization of microbial communities via several powerful computational approaches. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the predicted metabolic pathways of the cervicovaginal microbiota associated with C. trachomatis genital infection in relation to the different Community State Types (CSTs), via PICRUSt2 analysis. Our results showed a more rich and diverse mix of predicted metabolic pathways in women with a CST-IV microbiota as compared to all the other CSTs, independently from infection status. C. trachomatis genital infection further modified the metabolic profiles in women with a CST-IV microbiota and was characterized by increased prevalence of the pathways for the biosynthesis of precursor metabolites and energy, biogenic amino-acids, nucleotides, and tetrahydrofolate. Overall, predicted metabolic pathways might represent the starting point for more precisely designed future metabolomic studies, aiming to investigate the actual metabolic pathways characterizing C. trachomatis genital infection in the cervicovaginal microenvironment.

Keywords: Chlamydia trachomatis; PICRUSt2; cervicovaginal microbiota; in-silico metabolic profiling; metagenomic data.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Alpha- and beta-diversity indexes of the predicted metabolic pathways between C. trachomatis-positive women and healthy controls. (A) Shannon’s and Pielou’s evenness indexes, used as a measure of alpha-diversity within groups; (B) Principal coordinate analysis of Bray–Curtis index, used as a measure of beta-diversity between groups. Each circle represents the predicted metabolic pathways in the cervicovaginal microbiota of each study subject.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Alpha- and beta-diversity indexes of the predicted metabolic pathways in the different CSTs. Shannon’s, Pielou’s evenness, and Bray-Curtis indexes of the metabolic pathways in the different CSTs in (A) C. trachomatis-positive women; (B) healthy controls. The gray circles in the boxplots represent the outliers; each colored circle represents the predicted metabolic pathways in the cervicovaginal microbiota of each study subject.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Alpha- and beta-diversity indexes of the predicted metabolic pathways in the CST-IV microbiota between C. trachomatis-positive women and healthy controls. (A) Shannon’s and Pielou’s evenness indexes; (B) Principal coordinate analysis of Bray-Curtis index. The gray circles in the boxplots represent the outliers; each colored circle represents the predicted metabolic pathways from each CST-IV microbiota.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Differences in the composition of predicted metabolic pathways of the cervicovaginal microbiota between C. trachomatis-positive women and healthy controls. The relative abundance of each pathway was expressed as means ± standard deviations (SD), and statistical significance was calculated by Welch’s t-test.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Differences in the composition of predicted metabolic pathways in the CST-IV microbiota between C. trachomatis-positive women and healthy controls. The relative abundance of each pathway was expressed as means ± standard deviations (SD), and statistical significance was calculated by Welch’s t-test.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Flowchart of 16s rDNA paired-end Illumina reads bioinformatic pipeline.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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