Fig. 1

Study design and nares and tongue dorsum microbiome characterization. A Schematic of microbial isolation and study design. The nares and tongue dorsum of lung cancer patients were swabbed, and individual microbes were isolated through culturomics. Filtered microbial supernatants were applied to A549 lung epithelial cells, and changes in IL-8 secretion were quantified. Microbes were subselected based on phylogenetic diversity, modulation of IL-8, and representation of predominant genera in the respiratory tract. Selected microbes were subsequently used to colonize ALIs for RNA-seq analysis. B, C Relative abundance plots of the most abundant bacteria and fungi were shown for select samples from the B nares and C tongue dorsum that were used for cultivation. D Total frequency for which each species was detected per site. E Overlap of genera and species recovered by culturomics compared to metagenomics for the two sampled sites. In the Venn diagram, the number of unique isolates and the percent of total unique isolates isolated using culturomics only, metagenomics only, and both were shown