The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Lack of detection of a human placenta microbiome in samples from preterm and term deliveries
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Historically, the human womb has been thought to be sterile in healthy pregnancies, but this idea has been challenged by recent studies using DNA sequence-based methods, which have suggested that the womb is colonized with bacteria. For example, analysis of DNA from placenta samples yielded small proportions of microbial sequences which were proposed to represent normal bacterial colonization. However, an analysis by our group showed no distinction between background negative controls and placenta samples. Also supporting the idea that the womb is sterile is the observation that germ-free mammals can be generated by sterile delivery of neonates into a sterile isolator, after which neonates remain germ-free, which would seem to provide strong data in support of sterility of the womb. RESULTS: To probe this further and to investigate possible placental colonization associated with spontaneous preterm birth, we carried out another study comparing microbiota in placenta samples from 20 term and 20 spontaneous preterm deliveries. Both 16S rRNA marker gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing were used to characterize placenta and control samples. We first quantified absolute amounts of bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences using 16S rRNA gene quantitative PCR (qPCR). As in our previous study, levels were found to be low in the placenta samples and indistinguishable from negative controls. Analysis by DNA sequencing did not yield a placenta microbiome distinct from negative controls, either using marker gene sequencing as in our previous work, or with shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Several types of artifacts, including erroneous read classifications and barcode misattribution, needed to be identified and removed from the data to clarify this point. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings do not support the existence of a consistent placental microbiome, in either placenta from term deliveries or spontaneous preterm births.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence data
Bolger, A. M., Lohse, M., & Usadel, B. (2014) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu170 · Cited by 65,548
DADA2: High–resolution sample inference from Illumina amplicon data
Callahan, B. J., McMurdie, P. J., Rosen, M. J., Han, A. W., Johnson, A. J. A., & Holmes, S. P. (2016) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/nmeth.3869 · Cited by 35,698
The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools
Quast, C., Pruesse, E., Yilmaz, P., Gerken, J., Schweer, T., Yarza, P., Peplies, J., & Glöckner, F. O. (2012) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gks1219 · Cited by 33,055
BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features
Quinlan, A. R., & Hall, I. M. (2010) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btq033 · Cited by 27,437
Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome
The Human Microbiome Project Consortium (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11234 · Cited by 11,726
O'Leary, N. A., Wright, M. W., Brister, J. R., Ciufo, S., Haddad, D., McVeigh, R., Rajput, B., Robbertse, B., Smith-White, B., Ako-Adjei, D., et al. (2016) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkv1189 · Cited by 6,357
Kraken: ultrafast metagenomic sequence classification using exact alignments
Wood, D. E., & Salzberg, S. L. (2014) · Genome Biology · doi:10.1186/gb-2014-15-3-r46 · Cited by 4,521
Reagent and laboratory contamination can critically impact sequence-based microbiome analyses
Salter, S. J., Cox, M. J., Turek, E. M., Calus, S. T., Cookson, W. O., Moffatt, M. F., Turner, P., Parkhill, J., Loman, N. J., & Walker, A. W. (2014) · BMC Biology · doi:10.1186/s12915-014-0087-z · Cited by 3,463
Preterm labor: One syndrome, many causes
Romero, R., Dey, S. K., & Fisher, S. J. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1251816 · Cited by 1,984
Topographical Continuity of Bacterial Populations in the Healthy Human Respiratory Tract
Charlson, E. S., Bittinger, K., Haas, A. R., Fitzgerald, A. S., Frank, I., Yadav, A., Bushman, F. D., & Collman, R. G. (2011) · American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine · doi:10.1164/rccm.201104-0655oc · Cited by 1,144
Self-citation
Cited by
Human placenta has no microbiome but can contain potential pathogens
de Goffau, M. C., Lager, S., Sovio, U., Gaccioli, F., Cook, E., Peacock, S. J., Parkhill, J., Charnock-Jones, D. S., & Smith, G. C. S. (2019) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1451-5 · Cited by 691
Identifying biases and their potential solutions in human microbiome studies
Nearing, J. T., Comeau, A. M., & Langille, M. G. I. (2021) · Microbiome · doi:10.1186/s40168-021-01059-0 · Cited by 240
Maternal vertical transmission affecting early-life microbiota development
Wang, S., Ryan, C. A., Boyaval, P., Dempsey, E. M., Ross, R. P., & Stanton, C. (2020) · Trends in Microbiology · doi:10.1016/j.tim.2019.07.010 · Cited by 243
Bile acids drive the newborn’s gut microbiota maturation
van Best, N., Rolle-Kampczyk, U., Schaap, F. G., Basic, M., Olde Damink, S. W. M., Bleich, A., Savelkoul, P. H. M., von Bergen, M., Penders, J., & Hornef, M. W. (2020) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17183-8 · Cited by 226
Deep microbial analysis of multiple placentas shows no evidence for a placental microbiome
Kuperman, A., Zimmerman, A., Hamadia, S., Ziv, O., Gurevich, V, Fichtman, B., Gavert, N., Straussman, R., Rechnitzer, H., Barzilay, M., et al. (2020) · BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology · doi:10.1111/1471-0528.15896 · Cited by 143
Metadata
- Authors
- Leiby, J. S., McCormick, K., Sherrill-Mix, S., Clarke, E. L., Kessler, L. R., Taylor, L. J., Hofstaedter, C. E., Roche, A. M., Mattei, L. M., Bittinger, K., Elovitz, M. A., Leite, R., Parry, S., & Bushman, F. D.
- Venue
- Microbiome
- Published
- 2018-10-30
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 196-196
- ISSN
- 2049-2618 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2899101060
- Cited by
- 271
- References
- 13
- FWCI
- 12.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Lack of detection of a human placenta microbiome in samples from preterm and term deliveries. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1186/s40168-018-0575-4
- The paper
- Leiby, J. S., McCormick, K., Sherrill-Mix, S., Clarke, E. L., Kessler, L. R., Taylor, L. J., Hofstaedter, C. E., Roche, A. M., Mattei, L. M., Bittinger, K., Elovitz, M. A., Leite, R., Parry, S., & Bushman, F. D. (2018). Lack of detection of a human placenta microbiome in samples from preterm and term deliveries. Microbiome. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-018-0575-4
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.