Identifying Gut Microbiota Associated With Colorectal Cancer Using a Zero-Inflated Lognormal Model

Conclusions We analyzed the alpha diversity of the gut microbial community of 156 healthy, adenoma and CRC samples. We found the alpha diversity was significantly higher in healthy samples as compared to the CRC samples. We applied a modified ZIL model and identified nine significantly different genera between the healthy and CRC groups, i.e., Anaerostipes, Bilophila, Catenibacterium, Coprococcus, Desulfovibrio, Flavonifractor, Porphyromonas, Pseudoflavonifractor, and Weissella. We used these nine genera as input features for a random forest classifier and successfully predicted the CRC status with a high AUC score of 0.9333. Our results suggested that the community member and the overall structure of the gut microbiota are potential effective biomarkers of CRC stages. This avenue is being actively pursued by us and other computational researchers (Chen and Yan, 2013; Chen et al., 2016b,c, 2018a,b,c; Chen and Huang, 2017), who may bring in novel strategies for preventing and curing CRC in the near future. Author Contributions DA and YG conducted the analysis, summarized the result and drafted the manuscript. HP, XL, and GL assisted in the data analysis and contributed to the manuscript. DA and LX conceived the study. LX supervised the manuscript writing. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. Funding This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61873027, 61370131). LX is supported by the Innovation in Cancer I...
Source: Frontiers in Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Source Type: research