Meeting Abstract

P2-71   -   Meta-analysis of prenatal microbiome studies Gardner, SA*; Campbell, P; University of California, Riverside; University of California, Riverside sgard014@ucr.edu

The presence or absence of a prenatal microbiome in mammalian systems is contentious. Many recent studies support the presence of microbes in prenatal tissues, however, there have also been a number of studies that have found little or no evidence for microbial presence with many also arguing that the evidence found in support of prenatal microbes is due to contamination or issues with analyses. The ongoing debate, as well as the public availability of sequencing data, makes this a perfect opportunity to conduct a meta-analysis of the genetic data from studies that do and do not find evidence of a prenatal microbiome. Potential studies were screened for the tissue type included, sequencing method, inclusion of contamination protocols, and public availability of data. All studies included in the meta-analysis were from either mouse or human models. The original genetic data from each study was processed in QIIME2. To combat issues with contamination of low biomass samples (e.g. the placenta), the resulting dataset was compared against additional studies with common contaminants from commercial kits and environmental sources. The results of this meta-analysis will inform future studies of the prenatal microbiome as it may uncover a core set of taxa shared among studies, or may reveal the need for more stringent protocols to avoid contamination in the event that no microbial signal is detected across studies after removal of common contaminants from the data set.