Fungal Diversity in Gut Microbiota in Patients with Cancer

Abstract

Patients who have cancer are more prone to get infections than healthy individuals. In this study, we applied cloning sequencing technique to identify the mycobiome and other transient fungal components in the digestive tract of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), Leucopenia and anemia and compare it with the fungal components of healthy individuals. Fungal universal primer pair targeting ITS region of the fungal genome was used to assess the fungal components in fecal samples. Approximately more than 1,481 clones were selected and subjected to sequence analysis resulted in detection of a total of 44 and 43 fungal species from both fecal samples of cancer patients and healthy control individuals respectively. The majority of fungi were assigned to the 3 taxa Ascomycota (n = 39/63, 61.9 %), Basidiomycota (n = 23/63, 36.5 %) and Zygomycota (n= 1/63, 1.6 %). Fungal species such as Candida parapsilosis , Candida dubliniensis , Malassezia restricta were represented only in the feces of cancer patients. Moreover, the results from analyzing ITS clone library revealed that the most frequently detected fungi of the Malassezia genus ( Malassezia globosa , Malassezia pachydermatis , Malassezia restricta ) were retrieved in high amount in the fecal samples of cancer patients compared with those of healthy volunteers. Further efforts and studies are needed to shed light on the complex relationships between the fungal populations and the host immune system in cancer patients.