Dottorato in SCIENZE DELLA VITA

Titolo della tesi: The Role of Microbiota in Urinary Tract Cancer

The present study aimed to investigate the bladder microbiome composition in the controls (stress incontinence) and bladder cancer patients (women only) to understand the microbial community structure, microbial diversity and potential role of specific taxa in the disease. For this purpose, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing was performed to get a detailed profile of the bladder microbiome in the two groups. Despite clinical differences, the findings from a bioinformatics analysis on the alpha and beta diversity showed no significant differences. Both groups showed similar Shannon diversity index and Simpson’s diversity index, suggesting that microbial richness and diversity remained consistent between these groups. Also, the PERMANOVA results indicated no statistically significant difference in the overall bacterial community composition between control and patient groups (p > 0.05) based on Unweighted UniFrac distances. However, a prominent shift in the microbial composition was noticed, with the control group showing elevated amounts of genera such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, while the bladder cancer patient group had a higher abundance of genera such as Escherichia-Shigella and Corynebacterium. This study provides an in-depth examination of the bacterial composition in the bladder cancer patients and control in women, covering various stages from the collection of samples to advanced microbial analysis. The findings suggest that specific microbial shifts, particularly the overrepresentation of certain genera in bladder cancer patients, could serve as potential biomarkers for non-invasive diagnostic testing. This study also employed both traditional urine culture (STD) and expended quantitative urine culture (EQUC) under aerobic and anaerobic conditions to identify and isolate colonies from these culture conditions and which were preserved to perform future MALDI-TOF MS analysis and characterize bacterial species of potential therapeutic or diagnostic use.