Journal Article
Unveiling the Viral Landscape in Gastric Cancer
Diego Pereira; Fabiano Cordeiro Moreira; Daniel de Souza Avelar; Sérgio Augusto Antunes Ramos; Valéria Cristiane Santos da Silva; Jéssica Manoelli Costa da Silva; Ronald Matheus da Silva Mourão; Rubem Ferreira da Silva; Kauê Sant’Ana Pereira Guimarães; Juliana Barreto Albuquerque Pinto; Marcos da Conceição; Williams Fernandes Barra; Samia Demachki; Samir Mansour Casseb; Rommel Mario Rodriguez Burbano; Paulo Pimentel de Assumpção
Current Microbiology · Vol. 83, Issue 10 · 2026
Abstract
The present study aimed to comprehensively characterize the cancer-associated virome in patients with gastric cancer. A total of 452 samples were analyzed, including 226 tumor tissues and 202 peritumoral tissues from patients undergoing surgical resection, alongside 24 normal gastric mucosa samples obtained via endoscopy from individuals without cancer. RNA was extracted, libraries were prepared, and paired-end sequencing was performed on the NextSeq 500 platform (Illumina, US). High-quality reads were processed with Kraken2, using the standard database supplemented with the Reference Viral Database, to identify viral taxa. Taxonomic profiles, differential viral abundance, and alpha and beta diversity metrics were computed in RStudio, with statistical analyses performed to compare viral composition and diversity among tissue groups using Kruskal-Wallis, Wilcoxon, PERMANOVA, and PERMDISP tests ( p