The "crossover effect" of COVID-19 in pregnancy on the infant microbiome

Olga Ignatyeva^1*Veronika Erema¹Еlena Zelenova¹Alina Cherdakli¹Ekaterina Bolashova¹Lorena Matkava¹Anna Shegurova¹Mikhail Volkov¹Anzhelika Zagainova¹Daria Kashtanova¹Mikhail Ivanov¹Bayr Bembeeva²Victor Zubkov²Alexey Gordeev²Tatiana Priputnevich²Vladimir Yudin¹Valentin Makarov¹Anton Keskinov¹Sergey Kraevoy¹Sergey Yudin¹Veronika Skvortsova³

• ¹Centre for Strategic Planning, Moscow, Russia
• ²National Medical Research Center Of Obstetrics, Gynecology And Perinatology Named After Academician V.I. Kulakova, Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Russia
• ³Federal Medical & Biological Agency of Russia, Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Russia

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on public health. However, the impact of COVID-19 infection during pregnancy on the microbiome of the mother and her newborn child still remains poorly understood. This study involved 94 mother-child pairs whose mothers had COVID-19 during pregnancy and 44 newborns as a control group recruited in 2018.Stool samples were collected from women before delivery and from infants at 5-7 days after birth and used for 16S rRNA sequencing. We found that the microbiomes of infants exposed in utero to COVID-19 showed decreased microbial diversity and richness. Moreover, we observed a higher variance inter-sample variability of between infant samples in the case group, which might suggest destabilization of their microbiomes. Neither alpha-nor beta-diversity metrics differed significantly between the groups depending on the trimester when the mother contracted COVID-19. Thus, the timing of prenatal COVID-19 exposure had no effect on the infant gut microbiome.