Issues

HPV infection is very common in sexually active women, and the infecting HPVs can usually be spontaneously eliminated from individuals within 6 to 18 months. Only a small proportion of infected women retain the virus, and this could lead to the development of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and cervical carcinoma. The mechanism by which some individuals develop a persistent HPV infection that goes on to develop into clinically significant disease, however, remains largely unclear. Emerging evidence shows that the cervicovaginal microbiota play a substantial role in the infection and clearance of HPV in the reproductive tract and constitute a new biomarker reservoir to predict the persistence or regression of HPV. The cover shows the cervical communities of cytologically normal women from Beijing, China were classified into 5 community state types (CST) in hierarchical clustering analyses based on the Jensen–Shannon distance matrix and Ward linkage. Each point represents a sample. The CST1 (in red) is dominated by Lactobacillus iners; CST2 (in yellow) by Lactobacillus crispatus; CST3 (in green) by Leptotrichia amnionii, Gardnerella ADEV_s, and a variety of Pseudomonas spps, CST4 (in blue) by Gardnerella ADEV_s, Atopobium vaginae, and Lactobacillus iners; and CST5 (in purple) by Salmonella enterica, a variety of Lactobacillus spps, Pseudomonas spps, Prevotella spps, and Streptococcus spps, respectively. See the article by Ritu et al. (beginning on page 43) for more information.