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The relationship among microbiome, immunity and cervical cancer has been targeted by several studies, yet many questions remain unanswered. We characterized herein the virome and bacteriome from cervical samples and correlated these findings with innate immunity gene expression in a Brazilian convenience sample of HPV-infected (HPV+) and uninfected (HPV-) women. For this purpose, innate immune gene expression data were correlated to metagenomic information. Correlation analysis showed that interferon (IFN) is able to differentially modulate pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) expression based on HPV status. Virome analysis indicated that HPV infection correlates to the presence of Anellovirus (AV) and seven complete HPV genomes were assembled. Bacteriome results unveiled that vaginal community state types (CST) distribution was independent of HPV or AV status, although bacterial phyla distribution differed between groups. Furthermore, TLR3 and IFNαR2 levels were higher in the Lactobacillus no iners-dominated mucosa and we detected correlations among RIG-like receptors (RLR) associated genes and abundance of specific anaerobic bacteria. Collectively, our data show an intriguing connection between HPV and AV infections that could foster cervical cancer development. Besides that, TLR3 and IFNαR2 seem to create a protective milieu in healthy cervical mucosa ( L. no iners-dominated), and RLRs, known to recognize viral RNA, were correlated to anaerobic bacteria suggesting that they might be related to dysbiosis., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Britto, Siqueira, Curty, Goes, Policarpo, Meyrelles, Furtado, Almeida, Giannini, Machado and Soares.)

After a one-year rollout of the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, the continuous dissemination of the virus has generated a number of variants with increased transmissibility and infectivity, called variants of concern (VOC), which now predominate worldwide. Concerns about the susceptibility of humans that have already been infected before or those already vaccinated to infection by VOC rise among scientists and clinicians. Herein, we assessed the prevalence of different VOC among recent infections at the Brazilian National Cancer Institute (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). By using a Sanger-based sequencing approach targeting the viral S gene to identify VOC, we have analyzed 72 recent infections. The overall prevalence of VOC was 97%. Among the subjects analyzed, six had been vaccinated with the ChAdOx1-S/nCoV-19 (n = 4; one with two doses and three with one dose) or the CoronaVac (n = 2; both with 2 doses) vaccine, while five subjects represented reinfection cases, being two of them also part of the vaccinated group (each one with one vaccine type). All vaccinated and re-infected subjects carried VOC irrespective of the vaccine type taken, the number of doses taken, IgG titers or being previously infected during the first wave of the Brazilian pandemic. Importantly, all six vaccinees only had mild symptoms. We present here several examples of how natural infections or vaccination may not be fully capable of conferring sterilizing immunity against VOC., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)