Culturomics reveals Fusobacterium-Prevotella mutualism as a hallmark of nasopharyngeal tumor microbiota.

Authors

Ying-Qi Lu, Jia-Hao Dai, Yu-Fei Duan, Guan-Jie Qin, Sai-Wei Huang, Li Lin, Xi-Rong Tan, Xun-Hua Zhu, Qing-Mei He, Jing-Yun Wang, Mei-Yin Zhang, Sen-Yu Feng, Shi-Wei He, Nan Si, Jia-Qi Wu, Guan-Lin Lv, Ye-Lin Liang, Jun-Yan Li, Sha Gong, Ying-Qin Li, Lili Li, Jun Ma, Jia-Xing Yue, Na Liu

Published in

Science translational medicine. Volume 18. Issue 858. Pages eaec4847. Jul 15, 2026. Epub Jul 15, 2026.

Abstract

The nasopharynx constitutes a critical niche in the upper respiratory tract, harboring a diverse microbiota linked to nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), the mechanistic roles of which remain poorly understood. Here, we established the Nasopharyngeal Mucosal and Tumor-resident Bacterial Catalog (NMTBC) that comprises 5311 bacterial isolates representing 127 species, with 1006 of them being fully sequenced and annotated, providing a comprehensive culturable resource facilitating mechanistic dissection of the microbiome-tumor interactions. With NMTBC, we uncovered a Fusobacterium-Prevotella mutualism and revealed heterotypic bacterium-bacterium interactions involving transcriptional reprogramming and metabolic cross-talk. Using single-bacterial transcriptomics, we mapped a high-resolution transcriptomic trajectory, showing the ability of a single strain to differentiate into functionally distinct subpopulations that cooperate to sustain mutualism. By analyzing a multicenter NPC cohort, we showed that Fusobacterium and Prevotella co-colonization in NPC tumors correlated with unfavorable clinical outcomes after conventional radiochemotherapy. Analysis of RNA-seq data from two previous phase 3 clinical trials showed that coenrichment of Fusobacterium-Prevotella predicted better response to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, highlighting their important role in microbiota-mediated immunomodulation. Overall, this study establishes a comprehensive nasopharyngeal bacterial catalog through culturomics, which offers valuable insights into microbiome-derived biomarker discovery and immunotherapy patient stratification in clinical practice.

PMID:
42455902
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 16 Jul 2026.

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