Previous studies have shown that gut microbiota can affect human immune system in many ways. Our aim was to investigate quantitative differences in fecal bacterial compositions of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients compared to those of healthy children, so as to identify individual bacterial species that are related to the etiology of ALL. We recruited 81 subjects, including 58 patients with ALL and 23 healthy controls. Fecal samples were collected and examined by 16S rRNA quantitative arrays and bioinformatics analysis. Both Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) and Non-metric Multidimensional scaling (NMDS) demonstrated that the microbial composition of ALL patients deviated from the tight cluster of healthy controls. Multiple bacterial species exhibited significant changes (e.g., Roseburia faecis, Edwardsiella tarda, and Fusobacterium naviforme) in the ALL samples. Some of the differentially abundant taxa were correlated with the level of interleukin-10. The ALL cases could be efficiently distinguished from healthy controls by the random forest model based on differential species (area under ROC curve = 0.843). Taken together, the composition of gut microbiota differed from healthy controls to pediatric ALL patients. Our study identified a series of ALL-related species in the gut microbiota, providing a new direction for future studies aiming to understand the host-gut microbiota interplay in ALL pathogenesis.

先前的研究表明，肠道菌群可以多种方式影响人体免疫系统。我们的目的是调查与健康儿童相比，儿童急性淋巴细胞白血病（ALL）患者粪便细菌成分的定量差异，以鉴定与ALL病因相关的个体细菌。我们招募了81名受试者，包括58名ALL患者和23名健康对照。收集粪便样品，并通过16S rRNA定量阵列和生物信息学分析进行检查。主坐标分析（PCoA）和非度量多维标度（NMDS）均表明，所有患者的微生物组成均与健康对照组紧密相关。多种细菌种类表现出显着变化（例如，Roseburia faecis，爱德华氏菌和 纳维梭菌）中的所有样本。一些差异丰富的分类单元与白介素10的水平相关。通过基于差异物种的随机森林模型（ROC曲线下的面积= 0.843），可以将所有病例与健康对照有效区分开。两者合计，肠道菌群的组成与健康对照组和小儿ALL患者不同。我们的研究在肠道菌群中鉴定出一系列与ALL相关的物种，为今后旨在了解宿主肠道菌群在ALL发病机理中的相互作用的研究提供了新的方向。