Abstract 2828: Bacterial diversity correlates with tumor stage and survival in stomach and lung TCGA cancer cohorts

Abstract

Microbiological infections account for up to 20% of the total global cancer burden. Infection-associated cancers are commonly attributed to viral, and to a lesser extent, parasitic and bacterial etiologies. There is growing evidence that microbial variation can influence cancer development, progression, response to therapy, and outcome. We wanted to examine the microbial composition of paired tumor and adjacent normal tissue across various cancer types in order to provide an improved understanding of microbial diversity and abundance patterns of the tumor microenvironment and their influence on clinical presentation and survival. We hypothesized that adjacent normal will be associated with greater species diversity. Methodology: 2234 TCGA tumor & adjacent normal sequencing files (phs000178.v.9.p8; Project ID 14778) representing 1532 cases from stomach adenocarcinoma (TCGA -STAD) and bronchus & lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma (TCGA-LUAD, LUSC ) primary tumor sites were processed through a bioinformatics pipeline designed to generate microbial profiles from raw DNA sequences using PathoScope 2.0 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pathoscope/) and visualized with KRONA™ plots (Ondov BMC Bioinformatics 2011,12:385). Diversity metrics were calculated to compare taxa between tumor & its paired adjacent normal using vegan R-package (version 2.5.2). Differential abundance was examined using Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Sum test. Bacterial taxa with false discovery rate (FDR) adjusted P-value Citation Format: Rebecca M. Rodriguez, Vedbar S. Khadka, Mark Menor, Youping Deng, Brenda Y. Hernandez. Bacterial diversity correlates with tumor stage and survival in stomach and lung TCGA cancer cohorts [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 2828.