Study design and taxonomic composition of vaginal fluid metatranscriptomes in BV during and after treatment with metronidazole. Study design and taxonomic composition of vaginal fluid metatranscriptomes in BV during and after treatment with metronidazole. (A) Time course of the clinical study. (B) Taxonomic composition of the metatranscriptome at visit 1 (diagnosis) and visit 2 (after metronidazole therapy). (C) Cumulative dominance of the vaginal microbiota in BV and non-BV. (D) The subspecies composition of the G. vaginalis subcommunity. Species with an average relative abundance lower than 0.5% were grouped into “Others.” A red dot at the top of a sample column in panel B indicates BV. The digits indicate the patient ID, while the letters a and b denote visit 1 and visit 2. After the first sampling at visit 1, the patients were treated with metronidazole. Total putative bacterial mRNA reads were mapped to the ref_Genome database using Kraken (see Materials and Methods for details). BV status was determined by Nugent score. The “BV” and “NBV” in parentheses in panel C indicate BV and non-BV, respectively. Zhi-Luo Deng et al. mSphere 2018; doi:10.1128/mSphereDirect.00262-18