ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Extra-intestinal Microbiome
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2025.1571341
Integrated analysis of microbiome and host transcriptome revealed correlations between tissue microbiota and tumor progression in early-stage papillary thyroid carcinoma
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Thyroid and Breast Surgery, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China
- 2Department of Thyroid and Breast Surgery, Second Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China
- 3Department of Thyroid, Breast and Vascular Surgery, Shanghai Fourth People's Hospital, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China
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Emerging evidences suggest that microorganisms in the tumor microenvironment play important roles in tumor occurrence and progression. However, the microbial distribution in the papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) tissue and its relationship with PTC are unclear. 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and RNA-Seq were performed to explore the composition of tissue microbiome and its effects on the host gene expression during the development of early-stage PTC. We found that the tumor tissues indeed harbored complex microbial communities, which showed significant differences in microbial and functional composition between the tumor and para-cancerous tissues. A set of differential microbial genera were identified to be significantly associated with the clinical factors, such as Planococcus enriched in tumor tissue, Limnobacter in T1a stage and Cutibacterium in N1b stage. 793 differential expressed genes were also identified, which are mainly enriched with functions related to cell-cell communication and extracellular matrix. In terms of the immune cell composition, 8 differential immune cell types were further identified, suggesting a significant immune response in PTC. Finally, association analysis identified 5 pairs of microbe-gene association and 1 pair of microbe-cell with significance, which were all involved in the tumorigenesis and tumor progression via inflammation-related pathways. These results, especially the microbes and genes involved in the pairs, would provide candidate targets for exploring the molecular mechanisms of tissue microbiome in tumorigenesis and tumor progression of PTC.
Keywords: PTC, Tissue microbiome, Host gene expression, microbe-gene association, microbe-cell association
Received: 05 Feb 2025; Accepted: 13 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tong, Chen, Shen, Pan, Wang, Xu and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sheng Liu, Department of Thyroid, Breast and Vascular Surgery, Shanghai Fourth People's Hospital, Shanghai, 200434, Shanghai Municipality, China
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