The Vaginal Microbiome in Women’s Reproductive Health: Multi-Omics, Host-Immune Mechanisms, and Precision Biomarkers

The vaginal microbiome plays a central role in women's reproductive health, shaping disease susceptibility, immune resilience, and treatment response across the lifespan. Although it makes up only a small fraction of the human microbiome, it exerts an outsized influence on local and systemic health, contributing to protection against infection, regulation of inflammation, and favorable reproductive outcomes. Advances in metagenomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics have deepened our understanding of how these microbial communities are composed and how they function, and have begun to reveal their influence on local and systemic immune pathways. Yet much of what we know remains descriptive. Disentangling the interactions among the host, the microbiome, and the environment is still difficult, and studies vary widely in methodological rigor and data comparability, which limits reproducibility and cross-cohort integration.This Research Topic aims to move the field from description toward mechanism and clinical application. Predicting disease risk or therapeutic response from microbiome profiles remains elusive, largely because of a shortage of standardized computational pipelines and validated biomarkers. We seek contributions that build integrative frameworks linking microbial ecology to host pathophysiology, and that apply advanced computational and systems-biology approaches to uncover mechanistic and predictive relationships between vaginal microbial ecosystems and reproductive outcomes. Central questions include how host genetic and immune factors shape microbial composition, how community shifts drive pathogenic risk, and how molecular signatures can serve as early markers of gynecological disease or pregnancy complications. By bringing together microbiology, immunology, computational biology, and clinical research, the collection aspires to accelerate the discovery of clinically actionable biomarkers and data-driven interventions for women's reproductive health, including in underexplored areas such as gynecological cancer.We welcome contributions across the following themes:- Multi-omics integration and computational methods for vaginal microbiome research- Standardization and reproducibility in analytical pipelines and data sharing- Machine-learning and network-based models for disease prediction and risk stratification- Host-microbiome and mucosal immune interactions in health and disease- Biomarker discovery for gynecological cancers, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and microbial dysbiosis- Translational and microbiome-based interventions to restore or maintain reproductive-tract healthWe invite Original Research, Methods, Brief Research Reports, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Systematic Reviews, and Perspectives. Work that pairs computational rigor with translational relevance, and that reports reproducibility-focused or negative results alongside new discovery, is especially encouraged. Topic editors: Hesam Hakim Javadi, Peggy De Vos Van Steenwijk, Ankit Kumar Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82704/the-vaginal-microbiome-in-womens-reproductive-health-multi-omics-host-immune-mechanisms-and-precision-biomarkers