The Microbiota of Breast Tissue and Its Association with Breast Cancer

UNLABELLED: In the United States, 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. Along with genetics, the environment contributes to disease development, but what these exact environmental factors are remains unknown. We have previously shown that breast tissue is not sterile but contains a diverse population of bacteria. We thus believe that the host's local microbiome could be modulating the risk of breast cancer development. Using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, we show that bacterial profiles differ between normal adjacent tissue from women with breast cancer and tissue from healthy controls. Women with breast cancer had higher relative abundances of Bacillus, Enterobacteriaceae and…