Association of vitamin D level and maternal gut microbiome during pregnancy: Findings from a randomized controlled trial of antenatal vitamin D supplementation.

Shifts in the maternal gut microbiome and vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy have been associated, separately, with health problems for both the mother and the child. Yet, they have rarely been studied simultaneously. Here, we analyzed gut microbiome (from stool samples obtained in late pregnancy) and vitamin D level (from blood samples obtained both in early and late pregnancy) data of pregnant women in the Vitamin D Antenatal Asthma Reduction Trial (VDAART), a randomized controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy, to investigate the association of vitamin D status on the pregnant women’s microbiome. To find associations we ran linear regressions on alpha diversity measures, PERMANOVA tests on beta diversity distances, and used the ANCOM-BS and Maaslin2 algorithms to find differentially abundant taxa. Analyses were deemed significant using a cut-off p-value of 0.05. We found that gut microbiome composition is associated with the vitamin D level in early pregnancy (baseline), the maternal gut microbiome does not show a shift in response to vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy, and that the genus