Comparative analysis of microbiome of bladder cancer patients

Abstract

Background: It has been studied that the urinary tract, which was once considered to be sterile retains a unique microbiome. The current study was performed to explore the microbiome of male and female cancerous bladder tissue, including 01 control sample and 09 cancer samples using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. In previous studies, the significance of microbiome has been found to be associated with the bladder cancer. For diversity analysis, V3-V4 regions of 16S rRNA were used for PCR and later sequencing was carried out through Illumina, Miseq platform. The metadata generated was analyzed on QIIME 1.9.1.Result: The bacterial diversity detected showed that five of the phyla; namely Proteobacteria (38.1%), Firmicutes (37.8%), Actinobacteria (5.9%), Thermi (4.9%) and Tenericutes (2.5%) were more abundant in all samples as compared to other phyla. The genera found in all samples were Enterobacter (18.3%), Bacillus (13.9%), Meiothermus (4.9%), Methylotenera (1.2%), Ralstonia (3.6%) and Streptocococcus (1.4%). Ralstonia and Streptococcus were absent in BLC 10 and BLC 2, respectively, while present in the rest. The results of alpha and beta diversity showed that female samples had more bacterial diversity and uniformity as compared to male samples. Conclusion: The present study used biopsy samples of newly diagnosed cancer patients without taking into account any treatment given to the cancer patients. Our analysis showed insignificant differences in alpha and beta diversity of male and female samples. The genus Meiothermus detected in this study was firstly reported in a bladder microbiome analysis. The data generated from such preliminary futuristic study can help in devising new diagnostic tools and therapies.