Abstract
Gut microbial alterations have great potential to predict the development of colorectal cancer (CRC); however, how gut microbes respond to the development of CRC in males and females at the community level is unknown. We aim to investigate the differences of gut microbiota between the male and female. We reanalysed the dataset in a published project from a sex perspective at the community level by characterizing the gut microbiome in patients (including males and females) from three clinical groups representative of the stages of CRC development: healthy, adenoma, and carcinoma. The results indicated that the microbial α-diversity showed no significant difference in the male gut but had decreased significantly in the female gut with the development of CRC. In males, a significant difference in the microbial β-diversity was only observed between the healthy and carcinoma subgroups. However, significant community deviations were detected with the development of CRC in females. The microbial community assembly processes changed from deterministic to stochastic in males, whereas they became increasingly deterministic in females with the development of CRC. Moreover microbial co-occurrence associations tended to be more complicated in males; rare species were enriched in the co-occurrence network of the male gut, whereas key species loss was observed in the co-occurrence network of the female gut. The microbial communities in the male gut were more stable than those in the female gut, and microbial community assembly in the gut was sex dependent with the development of CRC. Our study suggests that sexual dimorphism needs to be considered to better predict the risk of CRC based on microbial shifts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing how gut microbes respond to the development of CRC in males and females at the community scale.
Highlights
Gut microbial shifts have great potential to predict the risk of colorectal cancer, but how gut microbes respond to the development of colorectal cancer in males and females at the community scale is unknown
Microbial co-occurrence associations tended to be more complicated when communities were primarily driven by stochastic processes in males; rare species were enriched in the co-occurrence network of the male gut, whereas key species loss was observed in the co-occurrence network of the female gut
Our findings indicate that microbial communities in the male gut are more stable than those in the female gut and that microbial community assembly in the gut is sex-dependent with the development of colorectal cancer
Summary
Gut microbial shifts have great potential to predict the risk of colorectal cancer, but how gut microbes respond to the development of colorectal cancer in males and females at the community scale is unknown. To address this question, we reanalyzed the dataset from a published project and grouped these data depending on sex into three groups, healthy, colorectal adenoma and carcinoma individuals, and community assembly and network patterns of gut microbes were evaluated by null model and cooccurrence network-based methods. Gut microbes dynamically interact with intestinal epithelial cells [10, 11]; microbial communities are likely altered with the development of colorectal cancer. Previous studies have demonstrated that the microbial communities in colorectal cancer patients deviate from those in normal individuals [16,17,18], and some studies have revealed how gut microbes change in healthy individuals compared to colorectal cancer patients at the taxonomic scale
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