Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases - University of Manitoba
Ruth’s research is focused on assessing the impact of sex and behavior associated with sex work on the microbiome and immune milieu of the female genital tract of adolescent girls and young women engaging in high risk sexual behavior. This will provide additional knowledge to better understand HIV risk factors at the time of entry into sex work. You can learn more about her through her LinkedIn profile.
Well done
Hi Azizur,
I used metaboanalyst to carry out unsupervised hierarchical clustering. I have tried different methods like AGNES and the clusters still remain the same; cytokine receptors that were down regulated cluster together and those that were up-regulated cluster together.
Thanks.
Hi Noel, great job! I am wondering which clustering method you used and which software?
What do you think, if you used different clustering method than that you have used, does your result will change the number of clusters?
Hi Azizur,
I used metaboanalyst to carry out unsupervised hierarchical clustering.
I have tried other clustering methods like AGNES and the clusters remain the same; cytokine receptors that were up-regulated and those that were down regulated.
Thanks.
Hi Ruth,
Very important work you are doing! As part of the study, were the number of partners, the frequency of vaginal sexual interactions, and the frequency of physical barries (female or male condoms) examined between groups? I would think that more frequent unprotected vaginal intercourse would contribute to pH and microbiome changes, and perhaps changes in the experssion of cytokine and chemokine receptors. Could you comment on this? Thanks!
Hi Samantha,
Certainly the factors you have mentioned have an impact on microbiome. We discussed their differences between the groups and their impact on microbiome in our first paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32433252/). Although these factors did not have any significant impact on cytokine receptor expression.