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University of East Anglia researchers have discovered the genetic blueprints of 18 new bacterial species collected from prostate cancer patients.

Most came from the mouth, including new types of Porphyromonas, which the team has previously linked to more aggressive prostate cancer, and Treponema.

Whether they contribute to prostate cancer is unknown, but this work provides new insights into microbes in cancer patients and could uncover links that improve understanding of how cancer develops.

The discovery shows how detailed bacterial genomes can be assembled from the sequencing data left over when researchers study human DNA, at no additional cost and without collecting a single extra sample.

"Recovering anaerobic bacterial genomes in saliva, tumour and blood whole genome sequencing data from patients with prostate cancer" is published in npj Biofilms and Microbiomes.

The team recovered 249 near-complete bacterial genomes from 194 prostate cancer patients. Twenty-four of these did not match any species on record.

The study is one of several major publications from the Pan Prostate Cancer Group (PPCG), a global collaboration co-founded and co-led by scientists at UEA and The Institute of Cancer Research, London.

The consortium has brought together researchers from nine countries and molecular data from more than 2,000 prostate cancers to create one of the world's most comprehensive resources for studying the disease.

When a tumor or a blood sample is sequenced, a small proportion of the reads do not match human DNA at all, so they are normally filtered out as 'noise' and discarded.

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