New study on bacterial species of the intestine

Various bacterial species residing in the human intestine, including genotoxic strains of E.coli, have been reported to be involved in colorectal cancer tumorigenesis. A University of Hyderabad (UoH) research team led by Niyaz Ahmed of the department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, examined 4,000 genomes of genotoxic bacterial strains of E. coli using high-throughput comparative genomics and phylogenetic analyses to understand the prevalence and epidemiology of the bacteria that produce ‘colibactin’, a genotoxin that causes DNA breaks leading to cancer.