Site-specific determinants of the oral microbiome
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Oral microbes are regarded as the principal cause of periodontitis. However, next-generation sequencing studies have demonstrated that the transition from health to disease is attributed to a shift in the global balance of the microflora rather than to specific pathogens. This highlights the importance of examining each patient's oral microbiome as prerequisite for assessing individual disease susceptibility and for the development of personalized therapies. The objective of this study is to observe the differences, if any, in the oral microbiome of individuals at different sites and to determine the site-specific factors that contribute to these differences. Site-specific subgingival plaque samples were collected at two time points five years apart from 303 individuals in both healthy and periodontally diseased sites as part of the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) effort. The same site was sampled at both timepoints. DNA was isolated from these samples and the V1-V3 and V4-V5 regions of the 16S rRNA gene was sequenced on the MiSeq platform. The sequences were aligned against the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD) using BLAST to identify species present in each sample. Alpha and beta diversity metrics were computed to investigate the site-specific differences in health and disease. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) was used to explore the influence of body mass index (BMI), diabetes, and smoking on the site-specific differences of the diseased oral microbiome. The microbial profiles of two sites within the same individual did not demonstrate significantly greater similarity than between two periodontally healthy individuals or two subjects with periodontitis (p>0.05, ANOSIM of Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity Index). LDA demonstrated that BMI, diabetes and smoking were significant drivers of this site-specific heterogeneity in diseased individuals, but not in healthy subjects.