Editor's SUmmary:

Microbes have been tied to different cancers, though such links can be tenuous and require rigorous analysis to substantiate. Many such analyses use data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, which will have a unique profile of potential technical artifacts and sequence contaminants. Gihawi et al. examined the pancancer association with microbes in a completely independent whole-genome sequencing dataset, Genomics England. They report that of all cancers studied, only colorectal and oral cancers harbor true associations—with a microbial signature and with pathogenic viruses, respectively. This study adds to our understanding of the microbial landscape in cancer. —Catherine Charneski