ArticleScience translational medicine2025
Comprehensive analysis of microbial content in whole-genome sequencing samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas project.
Article in Science translational medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- The Microbiome in Glioblastoma: Mechanisms, Tumor-Immune Interactions, and Translational Perspectives.MicrobiologyOpen · 2026Review
- Decoding the cancer microbiome: multi-omics, AI, and translational opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- Separating microbial signal from noise.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Article
- The Oral Microbiome: A Silent Contributor to Systemic Health and Disease National Institutes of Health 2024 Workshop.Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology · 2026Article
- Benchmarking methods for extracting microbial signal from host-dominated metatranscriptomes.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Bacterial engineering for cancer therapy.Nature cancer · 2026Review
- Article
- A comprehensive study of intratumor bacteria in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma identifiesmSystems · 2026Article
- Bad bugs mean business: gastric cancer is an intended consequence ofInfection and immunity · 2026Review
- Innovative technologies and future perspectives in tumor microbiomics.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Review
- Microbiota in the Tumor Metastatic Cascade: Emerging Evidence Across Invasion, Circulation, and Colonization.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- ATP5F1B promotes breast cancer progression through ERK associated metabolic reprogramming.Molecular biology reports · 2026Article
- Review
- Quantitative detection of gut microbial eukaryotes with EukDetect2 reveals global distribution of commensal protists and association with distinct microbial community structure.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Harnessing the microbiome for cancer therapy.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Systematic evaluation of TCGA tumor microbiota reveals context-dependent reliability.mSystems · 2026Article
- Sex-biased intratumoral microbiome influences tumor molecular and immune landscape and disease outcomes.Cell reports. Medicine · 2026Article
- Uncovering viral protein acquisition events and human-specific folds with pairwise comparisons of predicted protein structures.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Mutational signature-based classification uncovers emerging oral cancer subtypes with distinct molecular patterns.International journal of oral science · 2026Article
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5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In recent years, a growing number of publications have reported the presence of microbial species in human tumors and mixtures of microbes that appear to be highly specific to different cancer types. Our recent reanalysis of data from three cancer types revealed that technical errors have caused erroneous reports of numerous microbial species found in sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. Here, we have expanded our analysis to cover all 5734 whole-genome sequencing (WGS) datasets currently available from TCGA, covering 25 distinct types of cancer. We analyzed the microbial content using updated computational methods and databases and compared our results to those from two major recent studies that focused on bacteria, viruses, and fungi in cancer. Our results expand upon and reinforce our recent findings, which show that the presence of microbes is far smaller than had been previously reported and that many species identified in TCGA data might not be present at all. As part of this expanded analysis and to help others avoid being misled by flawed data, we have released a dataset that contains detailed read counts for bacteria, viruses, archaea, and fungi detected in all 5734 TCGA samples, which can serve as a public reference for future investigations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.