Co-evolution of vaginal microbiome and cervical cancer

Exploration of adaptive evolutionary changes at the genetic level in vaginal microbial communities during different stages of cervical cancer remains limited. This study aimed to elucidate the mutational profile of the vaginal microbiota throughout the progression of cervical disease and subsequently establish diagnostic models.

This study utilized a metagenomic dataset consisting of 151 subjects classified into four categories: invasive cervical cancer (CC) (n = 42), cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) (n = 43), HPV-infected (HPVi) patients without cervical lesions (n = 34), and healthy controls (n = 32). The analysis focused on changes in microbiome abundance and extracted information on genetic variation. Consequently, comprehensive multimodal microbial signatures associated with CC, encompassing taxonomic alterations, mutation signatures, and enriched metabolic functional pathways, were identified. Diagnostic models for predicting CC were established considering gene characteristics based on single nucleotide variants (SNVs).

In this study, we screened and analyzed the abundances of 18 key microbial strains during CC progression. Additionally, 71,6358 non-redundant mutations were identified, predominantly consisting of SNVs that were further annotated into 25,773 genes. Altered abundances of SNVs and mutation types were observed across the four groups. Specifically, there were 9847 SNVs in the HPV-infected group and 14,892 in the CC group. Furthermore, two distinct mutation signatures corresponding to the benign and malignant groups were identified. The enriched metabolic pathways showed limited similarity with only two overlapping pathways among the four groups. HPVi patients exhibited active nucleotide biosynthesis, whereas patients with CC demonstrated a significantly higher abundance of signaling and cellular-associated protein families. In contrast, healthy controls showed a distinct enrichment in sugar metabolism. Moreover, biomarkers based on microbial SNV abundance displayed stronger diagnostic capability (cc.AUC = 0.87) than the species-level biomarkers (cc.AUC = 0.78). Ultimately, the integration of multimodal biomarkers demonstrated optimal performance for accurately identifying different cervical statuses (cc.AUC = 0.86), with an acceptable performance (AUC = 0.79) in the external testing set.

The vaginal microbiome exhibits specific SNV evolution in conjunction with the progression of CC, and serves as a specific biomarker for distinguishing between different statuses of cervical disease.