713a Mining the Gut Microbiota for Novel Procarcinogenic Microbes Reveals Clostridioides difficile as a Driver of Colonic Tumorigenesis

Microbial studies in colorectal cancer (CRC) have largely focused on three species: colibactin-producing E. coli, enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis, and Fusobacterium nucleatum. However, not all CRC patients harbor these organisms, suggesting that either some CRC cases lack microbial associations or that additional procarcinogenic bacteria have yet to be identified. We previously demonstrated that a mixture of tumor slurries from 5 biofilm-positive (BF+) CRC patients was tumorigenic in germ-free (GF) and specific pathogen-free (SPF) ApcMin/+ mice.