The neovaginal microbiome of transgender women post-gender reassignment surgery
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Gender reassignment surgery is a procedure some transgender women (TW) undergo for gender-affirming purposes. This often includes the construction of a neovagina using existing penile and scrotal tissue and/or a sigmoid colon graft. There are limited data regarding the composition and function of the neovaginal microbiome representing a major gap in knowledge in neovaginal health. Results Metaproteomics was performed on secretions collected from the neovaginas ( n = 5) and rectums ( n = 7) of TW surgically reassigned via penile inversion/scrotal graft with ( n = 1) or without ( n = 4) a sigmoid colon graft extension and compared with secretions from cis vaginas ( n = 32). We identified 541 unique bacterial proteins from 38 taxa. The most abundant taxa in the neovaginas were Porphyromonas (30.2%), Peptostreptococcus (9.2%), Prevotella (9.0%), Mobiluncus (8.0%), and Jonquetella (7.2%), while cis vaginas were primarily Lactobacillus and Gardnerella . Rectal samples were mainly composed of Prevotella and Roseburia . Neovaginas (median Shannon’s H index = 1.33) had higher alpha diversity compared to cis vaginas (Shannon’s H = 0.35) ( p = 7.2E−3, Mann-Whitney U test) and were more similar to the non- Lactobacillus dominant/polymicrobial cis vaginas based on beta diversity (perMANOVA, p = 0.001, r 2 = 0.342). In comparison to cis vaginas, toll-like receptor response, amino acid, and short-chain fatty acid metabolic pathways were increased ( p < 0.01), while keratinization and cornification proteins were decreased ( p < 0.001) in the neovaginal proteome. Conclusions Penile skin-lined neovaginas have diverse, polymicrobial communities that show similarities in composition to uncircumcised penises and host responses to cis vaginas with bacterial vaginosis (BV) including increased immune activation pathways and decreased epithelial barrier function. Developing a better understanding of microbiome-associated inflammation in the neovaginal environment will be important for improving our knowledge of neovaginal health.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it