B0745
Title: Super-taxon in human microbiome are identified to be associated with colorectal cancer
Authors: Ting Li - Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong) [presenting]
Abstract: The idea of super-variant from statistical genetics is borrowed, and a new concept called super-taxon is proposed to exploit the hierarchical structure of taxa for microbiome studies, which is essentially a combination of taxonomic units. Specifically, a genus is modelled which consists of a set of OTUs at low hierarchy and is designed to reflect both marginal and joint effects of OTUs associated with the risk of CRC to address these issues. The power of super-taxon is first demonstrated in detecting highly correlated OTUs. Then, CRC-associated OTUs are identified in two publicly available datasets via a discovery-validation procedure. Specifically, four species of two genera are found to be associated with CRC: Parvimonas micra, Parvimonas sp., Peptostreptococcus stomatis, and Peptostreptococcus anaerobius. More importantly, for the first time, the joint effect of Parvimonas micra and Parvimonas sp. $(p=0.0084)$ are reported as well as that of Peptostrepto-coccus stomatis and Peptostreptococcus anaerobius $(p=8.21e-06)$ on CRC. The proposed approach provides a novel and useful tool for identifying disease-related microbes by taking the hierarchical structure of taxa into account. Further, it sheds new light on their potential joint effects as a community in disease development.
