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Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis
Microbes inhabit virtually everywhere on and/or in our bodies, including the seminal and vaginal fluids. They have significant importance in maintaining reproductive health and protecting hosts from diseases. The exchange of microbes during sexual intercourse is one of the most direct and significan...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8964342/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35368294 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2021.789983 |
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author | Ma, Zhanshan (Sam) |
author_facet | Ma, Zhanshan (Sam) |
author_sort | Ma, Zhanshan (Sam) |
collection | PubMed |
description | Microbes inhabit virtually everywhere on and/or in our bodies, including the seminal and vaginal fluids. They have significant importance in maintaining reproductive health and protecting hosts from diseases. The exchange of microbes during sexual intercourse is one of the most direct and significant microbial transmissions between men and women. Nevertheless, the mechanism of this microbial transmission was little known. Is the transmission mode stochastic, passive diffusion similar to the random walk of particles, or driven by some deterministic forces? What is the microbial transmission probability? What are the possible evolutionary implications, particularly from the perspective of sexual reproduction (selection)? We tackle these intriguing questions by leveraging the power of Hubbell’s unified neutral theory of biodiversity, specifically implemented as the HDP-MSN (hierarchical Dirichlet process approximated multi-site neutral model), which allows for constructing truly multi-site metacommunity models, simultaneously including vaginal and semen microbiomes. By reanalyzing the microbiome datasets of seminal and vaginal fluids from 23 couples both before and after sexual intercourses originally reported by Mändar and colleagues, we found that the microbial transmission between seminal and vaginal fluids is a stochastic, passive diffusion similar to the random walk of particles in physics, rather than driven by deterministic forces. The transmission probability through sexual intercourse seems to be approximately 0.05. Inspired by the results from the HDP-MSN model, we further conjecture that the stochastic drifts of microbiome transmissions during sexual intercourses can be responsible for the homogeneity between semen and vaginal microbiomes first identified in a previous study, which should be helpful for sexual reproduction by facilitating the sperm movement/survival and/or egg fertilization. This inference seems to be consistent with the classic Red Queen hypothesis, which, when extended to the co-evolutionary interactions between humans and their symbiotic microbiomes, would predict that the reproductive system microbiomes should support sexual reproduction. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8964342 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-89643422022-03-31 Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis Ma, Zhanshan (Sam) Front Microbiol Microbiology Microbes inhabit virtually everywhere on and/or in our bodies, including the seminal and vaginal fluids. They have significant importance in maintaining reproductive health and protecting hosts from diseases. The exchange of microbes during sexual intercourse is one of the most direct and significant microbial transmissions between men and women. Nevertheless, the mechanism of this microbial transmission was little known. Is the transmission mode stochastic, passive diffusion similar to the random walk of particles, or driven by some deterministic forces? What is the microbial transmission probability? What are the possible evolutionary implications, particularly from the perspective of sexual reproduction (selection)? We tackle these intriguing questions by leveraging the power of Hubbell’s unified neutral theory of biodiversity, specifically implemented as the HDP-MSN (hierarchical Dirichlet process approximated multi-site neutral model), which allows for constructing truly multi-site metacommunity models, simultaneously including vaginal and semen microbiomes. By reanalyzing the microbiome datasets of seminal and vaginal fluids from 23 couples both before and after sexual intercourses originally reported by Mändar and colleagues, we found that the microbial transmission between seminal and vaginal fluids is a stochastic, passive diffusion similar to the random walk of particles in physics, rather than driven by deterministic forces. The transmission probability through sexual intercourse seems to be approximately 0.05. Inspired by the results from the HDP-MSN model, we further conjecture that the stochastic drifts of microbiome transmissions during sexual intercourses can be responsible for the homogeneity between semen and vaginal microbiomes first identified in a previous study, which should be helpful for sexual reproduction by facilitating the sperm movement/survival and/or egg fertilization. This inference seems to be consistent with the classic Red Queen hypothesis, which, when extended to the co-evolutionary interactions between humans and their symbiotic microbiomes, would predict that the reproductive system microbiomes should support sexual reproduction. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-03-08 /pmc/articles/PMC8964342/ /pubmed/35368294 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2021.789983 Text en Copyright © 2022 Ma. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Microbiology Ma, Zhanshan (Sam) Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title | Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title_full | Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title_fullStr | Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title_full_unstemmed | Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title_short | Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis |
title_sort | microbiome transmission during sexual intercourse appears stochastic and supports the red queen hypothesis |
topic | Microbiology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8964342/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35368294 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2021.789983 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT mazhanshansam microbiometransmissionduringsexualintercourseappearsstochasticandsupportstheredqueenhypothesis |