Description
There is a critical need for an early diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer. Recent research supports an idea that an early diagnostic test could come from the analysis of the human oral salivary bacterial profiles. This form of cancer is noted for its very low survival rate. This is because it's most often detected only after it has spread to other parts of the body. Studies imply that biomarkers for pancreatic cancer may be found in the bacterial profiles of saliva. A recent study that focused on finding the bacterial community compositional differences between salivary samples from patients with pancreatic cancer and other groups found a significant bacterial species ratio biomarker. In this study, the focus will be on finding the differences between groups in terms of gene functions. This will be done by analyzing the sequence data of the whole metagenomes of salivary samples from patients with and without pancreatic cancer. The sequence annotation will be done with an online bioinformatic program call MG-RAST (Metagenomic Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology). Then a statistical analysis will be done using a program called Primer-e. The most notable findings from that analysis was that the abundance of genes from phages, prophages, transposable elements, and plasmids contributed the most to the functional differences between groups. In addition, all the functional gene profile categories that contributed at least 6% to the differences are reported in a table in the results section. Including the finding that there are less genes for the metabolism of aromatic compounds in the pancreatic cancer group. An MDS (Multidimensional Scaling) cluster analysis is included to give a visual overlook on how well they group. Although these findings were significant, further analyses should be done. Several similar, differences of groups' analyses, could be conducted considering the different kinds of phages, aromatic compounds, miscellaneous groups or other functional profiles that contribute significantly to the difference. Overall, the findings support that the bacterial and functional gene profile composition are significantly different between the groups. The prospect for producing an early diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer using human saliva looks hopeful.
