Abstract
Mounting evidence indicates that microbiome plays an important role in the development and progression of cancer. The dogma that urine in healthy individuals must be sterile has been overturned. Dysbiosis of the urinary microbiome has been revealed responsible for various urological disorders, including prostate cancer. The link between chronic inflammation, microbiome and solid tumors has been established for various neoplastic diseases. However, a detailed and comprehensive analysis of urinary microenvironment of bladder cancer has not been yet reported. We performed this study to characterize the potential urinary microbial community possibly associated with bladder cancer. Mid-stream urine was collected from 31 male patients with bladder cancer and 18 non-neoplastic controls. DNA was extracted from urine pellet samples and processed for high throughput 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the V4 region using Illumina MiSeq. Sequencing reads were filtered using QIIME and clustered using UPARSE. We observed increased bacterial richness (Observed Species, Chao 1 and Ace indexes; cancer vs. control; 120.0 vs. 56.0; 134.5 vs. 68.3; and 139.6 vs. 72.9, respectively), enrichment of some bacterial genera (e.g., Acinetobacter, Anaerococcus, and Sphingobacterium) and decrease of some bacterial genera (e.g., Serratia, Proteus, and Roseomonas) in cancer group when compared to non-cancer group. Significant difference in beta diversity was found between cancer and non-cancer group, among different risk level, but not among different tumor grade. Enrichment of Herbaspirillum, Porphyrobacter, and Bacteroides was observed in cancer patients with high risk of recurrence and progression, which means these genera maybe potential biomarkers for risk stratification. The PICRUSt showed that various functional pathways were enriched in cancer group, including Staphylococcus aureus infection, glycerolipid metabolism and retinol metabolism. To our knowledge, we performed the most comprehensive study to date to characterize the urinary microbiome associated with bladder cancer. A better understanding of the role of microbiome in the development and progression of bladder cancer could pave a new way for exploring new therapeutic options and biomarkers.
Highlights
Bladder cancer is diagnosed in more than 430,000 patients worldwide every year, making it the ninth most common malignancy (Kamat et al, 2016)
Cancer group was composed of 26 patients with non-muscleinvasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) and 5 patients with muscleinvasive bladder cancer (MIBC)
We have characterized the urinary microbial profile of bladder cancer by using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and the results showed that bacterial richness significantly increased in bladder cancer patients
Summary
Bladder cancer is diagnosed in more than 430,000 patients worldwide every year, making it the ninth most common malignancy (Kamat et al, 2016). Most of bladder cancer patients are male, five to six times more common than female in China (Li et al, 2015). The etiology and pathophysiology of bladder cancer remain unknown. It may be caused by genetic mutations and external risk factors, including tobacco smoking, carcinogen exposure, the chlorination of drinking water and possibly cyclophosphamide (Babjuk et al, 2017). Dysbiosis of the urinary microbiome has been revealed responsible for various urological disorders, such as urgency urinary incontinence, interstitial cystitis, overactive bladder and prostate cancer (Siddiqui et al, 2012; Pearce et al, 2014; Wu et al, 2017; Shrestha et al, 2018)
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