This 2020 paper on the cancer microbiome from Rob Knight's group has been retracted: www.nature.com/articles/s41...x.com/matthewherpe..., the authors agreed to the retraction, glad to hear they did so! There's still a *lot* of interesting stuff to grapple with here largely left unsaid 1/n

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach - Nature

Microbial nucleic acids are detected in samples of tissues and blood from more than 10,000 patients with cancer, and machine learning is used to show that these can be used to discriminate between and...

1. We don't have the exact reasoning why the authors landed on retraction. The issues raised were: 1. Profiling: false positives by kraken 2. Contamination: likely many contaminants 3. ML: may have a couple issues - altho one is debated by the work below www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 2/n

Compositional transformations can reasonably introduce phenotype-associated values into sparse features

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