Elucidating the Colorectal Cancer Gut Microbiome
By: Muhammad Afiq Osman (muhammadafiq@siswa.ukm.edu.my)
Over the past decades, gut microbiome has been associated with many diseases including colorectal cancer (CRC), where it has been suggested that certain changes in colon microbiota (particularly, an increase of pathobionts versus common colon commensals), could trigger the onset of CRC. This bacterial imbalance event, known as dysbiosis, may lead to various physiological disruption along the tumorigenesis sequence. Unraveling the basis of host-associated microbiome architecture would provide insights into this polymicrobial disease. To date, we still do not have any CRC gut microbiome catalogue from our local population. For that reason, we would like to characterize the gut microbiome architecture of Malaysian CRC patients and healthy (non-CRC) subjects.
In this study, we sequenced CRC and non-CRC tissue samples using the Illumina MiSeq platform, and performed preliminary analysis using the 16S Metagenomics App from Illumina BaseSpace. We observed that our findings are consistent with some previous publications, where the microbiome of CRC patients were found to be more enriched with pathobionts as compared to non-CRC. This study is still in progress.