Abstract
Gut microbiota have been implicated in the development of cancer. Colorectal and gastric cancers, the major gastrointestinal tract cancers, are closely connected with the gut microbiome. Nevertheless, the characteristics of gut microbiota composition that correlate with gastric cancer are unclear. In this study, we investigated gut microbiota alterations during the progression of gastric cancer to identify the most relevant taxa associated with gastric cancer and evaluated the potential of the microbiome as an indicator for the diagnosis of gastric cancer. Compared with the healthy group, gut microbiota composition and diversity shifted in patients with gastric cancer. Different bacteria were used to design a random forest model, which provided an area under the curve value of 0.91. Verification samples achieved a true positive rate of 0.83 in gastric cancer. Principal component analysis showed that gastritis shares some microbiome characteristics of gastric cancer. Chemotherapy reduced the elevated bacteria levels in gastric cancer by more than half. More importantly, we found that the genera Lactobacillus and Megasphaera were associated with gastric cancer.
Key Points
• Gut microbiota has high sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing patients with gastric cancer from healthy individuals, indicating that gut microbiota is a potential noninvasive tool for the diagnosis of gastric cancer.
• Gastritis shares some microbiota features with gastric cancer, and chemotherapy reduces the microbial abundance and diversity in gastric cancer patients.
• Two bacterial taxa, namely, Lactobacillus and Megasphaera, are predictive markers for gastric cancer.
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Data availability
Sequences that support the findings of this study have been deposited on NCBI under BioProject ID PRJNA639644 (available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/?term=PRJNA639644).
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Acknowledgments
We thank Mingyi Wo (Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital) for the help in sample collection and thank Yong Wang (Hangzhou Guhe Information and Technology Company) for the assistance in the data analysis. We would like to acknowledge the participants for providing samples.
Funding
This work was supported by the Medicine and Health Research Foundation of Zhejiang Province in China (2019RC012, 2019KY017, 2017KY216 and 2017KY486), and Key projects jointly constructed by the Ministry and the province of Zhejiang Medical and Health Science and Technology Project in China (WKJ-ZJ-2019). Key and Major Projects of Traditional Chinese Medicine Scientific Research Foundation of Zhejiang Province in China (2019ZZ001).
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JXL and ZW designed the study. YYZ and JS contributed to writing the manuscript. YYZ, GLJ, and YFN provided technical and material support and data analysis; XWS and YQD provided the samples and clinical data.
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Yaofang Niu and Gulei Jin from the Hangzhou Guhe Information and Technology Company. We declare no potential conflicts of interest were disclosed by the other authors.
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This work has been improved by the ethics committee of Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital.
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Zhang, Y., Shen, J., Shi, X. et al. Gut microbiome analysis as a predictive marker for the gastric cancer patients. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 105, 803–814 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-020-11043-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-020-11043-7