Paired biopsy-surface and tissue microbiome profiling reveals tissue-associated bacterial signatures in nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Authors

Nan Shi, Zongjian Huang, Xuesong Wang, Ying Xie, Anzhou Tang, Wei Xia

Published in

Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology. Volume 16. Pages 1892233. Epub Oct 14, 2026.

Abstract

Tumor-associated microbiota have been implicated in cancer biology, but the relationship between bacteria detected on the biopsy surface and those detected within tumor tissue remains poorly defined.
In this study, we profiled paired biopsy-surface swabs and tissue biopsies from patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) and benign nasopharyngeal lymphoid hyperplasia (NLH) controls using five-region 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Matched bulk RNA-seq data were analyzed to explore associations between microbial features, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) transcription, host pathway activity, and inferred immune-cell composition.
Tissue-associated microbial profiles showed stronger separation between NPC and NLH than biopsy-surface profiles in this discovery cohort. Several NPC-enriched species-level taxonomic assignments were associated with higher EBV transcript levels, proliferative and cell-cycle pathway activity, and lower inferred CD8 T-cell and plasmacytoid dendritic-cell signatures.
These findings indicate that NPC tissue contains microbial signatures that differ from biopsy-surface communities and support further validation of tissue-associated microbe-EBV-host relationships.

PMID:
42952527
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Oct 2026.

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