Fig. 1: Microbial community features of bacterial vaginosis.

Panel A shows a heatmap of the 15 most prevalent bacterial species that are indicated to the right of the heatmap. Each column represents a participant. Hierarchical clustering separates samples into two primary clades: one dominated by Lactobacillus and one with polymicrobialism. There is a significant tendency of the BV-positive cases to be found in the polymicrobial clade and BV-negative in the one dominated by Lactobacillus based on either the Amsel or Nugent diagnosis (see the “Methods” section) (p < 0.001 for both). Panel B shows the alpha diversity differences between BV diagnosed by either Amsel or Nugent criteria and the microbial communities based on the Chao1, Fisher, and Shannon diversity indices (all p < 0.001), as indicated at the right of the panels. Panels C and D show beta diversity analyses using PCoA and the Jensen–Shannon diversity index for the Amsel BV (panel C) (R² = 0.25, p < 0.001) and Nugent BV diagnosis (panel D) (R² = 0.59, p < 0.001). Panel E shows the top 20 microbial markers (based on W-stat) for detecting BV using the “clean” BV status sample set (Amsel+/Nugent+ vs. Amsel−/Nugent−). The y-axis represents the ANCOM W-stat, while the x-axis represents the mean relative abundance difference between BV+ and BV− cases for each bacterial taxon. The size of the circles represents relative abundance. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.