The ewe vaginal microbiota before breeding, during gestation, and after lambing

The goal of this study was to characterize the modulations in ewe vaginal microbiota throughout gestation. Vaginal swabs were collected from 29 Hampshire and Hampshire X Suffolk crossbred ewes before breeding, during gestation, and after lambing. 27 ewes in this dataset had successful pregnancies and two had spontaneous abortions. DNA was extracted from the swabs and the V4 region of the 16SrRNA gene was amplified and sequenced with Illumina MiSeq. For the two ewes that had abortions, addition Illumina NovaSeq shotgun sequencing was conducted to a subset of their samples to investigate the vaginal microbiota surrounding around the abortion.