LAUSR

The cervical microbiome is associated with cervical cancer risk, but how microbial diversity and functional profiles change in cervical cancer remains unclear. Herein, we investigated microbial-compositional and functional differences between a control group and a high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and cervical cancer (CIN2/3-CC) group. After retrospective collection of 92 cervical swab samples, we carried out 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing on 50 and 42 samples from the control and CIN2/3-CC groups, respectively. The EzBioCloud pipeline was applied to identify the genomic features associated with the groups using 16S rRNA data. A linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) was performed to assess the enrichment in the assigned taxonomic and functional profiles. We found a lower richness in the control group relative to the CIN2/3-CC group; however, the β-diversity tended to be similar between the groups. The LEfSe analysis showed that a phylum Sacchaaribacteria _TM7, 11 genera, and 21 species were more abundant in the CIN2/3-CC group and that one uncharacterized Gardnerella species was more abundant only in the control group. Further characterization of the functional pathways using EzBioCloud showed that the 4 KEGG orthologs (Phosphotransferase system [PTS] sucrose-specific IIA, IIB, IIC components and PTS cellubiose-specific IIC component) were involved in the KEGG pathway of starch and sucrose metabolism. The two pathways of folate biosynthesis and oxidative phosphorylation were more abundant in the CIN2/3-CC group. Further confirmation of these results in larger samples can help to elucidate the potential association between the cervical microbiome and cervical cancer.