Volume 9 ; Issue 1 ; in Month : Jan-June (2026) Article No : 175
Raghavendra S, Pooja M and Ramachandra Prasad LA.

Abstract

Objective: Changes in the gut microbiome have been progressively associated with colorectal cancer (CRC), but there is still a dearth of population-specific metagenomic data. The purpose of this work was to use shotgun metagenomic profiling to assess gut microbial dysbiosis linked to colorectal cancer and to find compositional changes that may have biological significance. Methods: The NCBI Sequence Read Archive's publically accessible colorectal cancer and healthy control dataset provided the stool shotgun metagenomic samples used in this investigation. For analysis, a balanced selection of CRC and healthy control samples was chosen. Quality control, host read removal, and taxonomy categorization using Kraken2 with Bracken-based abundance calculation were applied to sequencing reads to get microbiome profiles followed by Differential abundance analysis of the profiles which was carried out using the DESeq2 framework and microbial community diversity was evaluated using α- and β-diversity measures. Results: There was little indication of a decline in global diversity, and alpha-diversity indices revealed microbial richness and evenness that were nearly equal among CRC and control samples. However, a statistically significant variation in the overall community composition across groups was found using β-diversity analysis. Differential abundance testing revealed a clear microbial signature associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) samples in which opportunistic, pro-inflammatory and mucosa-associated taxa were observed to be significantly enriched and commensal beneficials such as Bifidobacterium sp. diminished. These findings suggested a significant restructuring of the gut microbiota rather than just an overall diversity decrease. Conclusion: Various alterations in gut microbiome composition were associated with colorectal cancer. These changes reflected a consistent pattern characterized by reduction of saccharolytic commensals and increase in taxa implicated with anaerobic and proteolytic metabolism which could be candidate microbiome-based biomarkers for CRC.

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