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BACKGROUND: The second most frequent cancer in the world and the most common malignancy in women is breast cancer. Breast cancer is a significant health concern in India with a high mortality-to-incidence ratio and presentation at a younger age. RECENT FINDINGS: Recent studies have identified gut microbiota as a significant factor that can have an influence on the development, treatment, and prognosis of breast cancer. This review article aims to describe the influence of microbial dysbiosis on breast cancer occurrence and the possible interactions between oncobiome and specific breast cancer molecular subtypes. The review further also discusses the role of epigenetics and diet/nutrition in the regulation of the gut and breast microbiome and its association with breast cancer prevention, therapy, and recurrence. Additionally, the recent technological advances in microbiome research, including next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, genome sequencing, single-cell sequencing, and microbial metabolomics along with recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have also been reviewed. This is an attempt to present a comprehensive status of the microbiome as a key cancer biomarker. CONCLUSION: We believe that correlating microbiome and carcinogenesis is important as it can provide insights into the mechanisms by which microbial dysbiosis can influence cancer development and progression, leading to the potential use of the microbiome as a tool for prognostication and personalized therapy.

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Dysbiosis or imbalance in the gut microbiome has been correlated with the etiology of a number of diseases/disorders. Thus, gut microbial communities can potentially be utilized for assessing the health of the human gut. Although the taxonomic composition of the microbiomes is dependent on factors such as diet, lifestyle, and geography, these microbes perform a specific set of common functions in the gut. In this study, metabolic pathway-based markers (agnostic to above-mentioned factors) specific to commensals and those specific to pathogens are utilized as indicators of gut health. Furthermore, this gut health assessment requires only a small set of features rather than complete sequencing of metagenomes. The proposed scheme can also be used to design personalized biotherapeutics, depending on functional aspects observed in an individual.

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The link between gut microbiome and brain is being slowly acknowledged due to the speculated role of resident gut microbial community in altering the functions of gut-brain axis (GBA). Recently, a number of microbial metabolites (referred to as neuro-active metabolites) produced through tryptophan metabolism have been suggested to influence the GBA. In view of this, the current study focuses on microbial tryptophan metabolism pathways which produce neuro-active metabolites. An in silico analysis was performed on bacterial genomes as well as publicly available gut microbiome data. The results provide a comprehensive catalog of the analyzed pathways across bacteria. The analysis indicates an enrichment of tryptophan metabolism pathways in five gut-associated phyla, namely, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Fusobacteria. Further, five genera, namely, Clostridium, Burkholderia, Streptomyces, Pseudomonas, and Bacillus have been predicted to be enriched in terms of number of the analyzed tryptophan metabolism pathways, suggesting a higher potential of these bacterial groups to metabolize tryptophan in gut. Analysis of available microbiome data corresponding to gut samples from patients of neurological diseases and healthy individuals suggests probable association of different sets of tryptophan metabolizing bacterial pathways with the etiology of different diseases. The insights obtained from the present study are expected to provide directions toward designing of microbiome based diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for neurological diseases/disorders.