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. 2020 Dec 9;12(5):426–435. doi: 10.1007/s13238-020-00813-8

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Interactions between microbes and tumor cells. Microbial communities in the tumor-bearing tissue and intratumor microbes are associated with cancer, but their exact role is not fully understood. Three main mechanisms have been proposed to explain how local microbes affect carcinogenesis and cancer progression: direct facilitation of DNA damage and increased mutagenesis (top left), activation of oncogenic signaling pathways (top right), and reduction or enhancement of tumorigenesis and tumor progression through interaction with the host immune system (bottom)