@misc{9234544,
  abstract     = {{The seminal microbiome remains undercharacterised despite its potential role as a microbial reservoir influencing female partner reproductive health. This study applied Oxford Nanopore full-length 16S rRNA sequencing (V1–V9) with EMU v3.6.1 classification to characterise the seminal microbiome of 288 men enrolled in the couple-based Copenhagen Pregnancy Loss cohort. The seminal community was polymicrobial and highly variable, dominated by Finegoldia magna (mean 9.82%, prevalence 79.9%); VALENCIA nearest-centroid classification assigned 92.8% of samples to CST IV, confirming fundamental compositional divergence from vaginal reference profiles. A co-occurrence subnetwork comprising Gardnerella vaginalis and Lactobacillus iners, both hallmarks of non-optimal vaginal microbiota, was identified within the seminal community, consistent with the hypothesis that a subset of men harbour microbial profiles shaped by recurrent exposure to vaginal dysbiosis. Body mass index was the sole clinical variable significantly associated with alpha diversity (Shannon ρ = 0.170, p_adj = 0.006) and with colonisation probability of eight anaerobic taxa in multivariable modelling (MaAsLin3 prevalence sub-model, q < 0.05), a finding independently corroborated by Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture community typing. Species-level discrimination between L. crispatus and L. iners, taxa that are indistinguishable by short-read V4 approaches, was uniquely enabled by full-length sequencing. All primary findings were robust to reference database choice, confirmed by cross-validation against GTDB. Body mass index was the strongest detectable host correlate of seminal microbial diversity, and positioned body weight as a possible modifiable factor in male reproductive microbiome health.}},
  author       = {{Muñoz Alvarez, Silvia Juliana}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Seminal Microbiome Characterization and Body Mass Index Associations in a Clinical Male Cohort Using Full-Length 16S rRNA Long-Read Sequencing}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}