Abstract
Oral microbes represent one of the most well studied microbial communities owing to the fact that they are a fundamental part of human development influencing health and disease, an easily accessible human microbiome, a highly structured and remarkably resilient biofilm as well as a model of bacteria-bacteria and bacteria-host interactions. In the last 80 years since oral plaque was first characterized for its functionally stable physiological properties such as the highly repeatable rapid pH decrease upon carbohydrate addition and subsequent recovery phase, the fundamental approaches to study the oral microbiome have cycled back and forth between community level investigations and characterizing individual model isolates. Since that time, many individual species have been well characterized and the development of the early plaque community, which involves many cell–cell binding interactions, has been carefully described. With high throughput sequencing enabling the enormous diversity of the oral cavity to be realized, a number of new challenges to progress were revealed. The large number of uncultivated oral species, the high interpersonal variability of taxonomic carriage and the possibility of multiple pathways to dysbiosis pose as major hurdles to obtain a systems level understanding from the community to the gene level. It is now possible however to start connecting the insights gained from single species with community wide approaches. This review will discuss some of the recent insights into the oral microbiome at a fundamental level, existing knowledge gaps, as well as challenges that have surfaced and the approaches to address them.
Highlights
Oral biofilm communities constitute dynamic, multiple-species metabolic networks with a multitude of interconnected functions (Figure 1)
Since biofilms are typically stratified with respect to oxygen concentration, these findings suggest that the outermost biofilm layer would possibly present high levels of lactic acid metabolites while internal regions of the biofilm that are closer to the enamel surface and exposed to reduced oxygen tensions would more likely give rise to other acids in combination with lactate
A validated system that fulfills these criteria and that can be readily used for example to target changes in taxa, regulation of metabolic pathways and signaling molecules by using generation sequencing (NGS) and “omics” methodologies (SIP, metatranscriptomics)
Summary
Reviewed by: Shu-Lin Liu, Harbin Medical University, China Margaret E. Oral microbes represent one of the most well studied microbial communities owing to the fact that they are a fundamental part of human development influencing health and disease, an accessible human microbiome, a highly structured and remarkably resilient biofilm as well as a model of bacteria-bacteria and bacteria-host interactions. In the last 80 years since oral plaque was first characterized for its functionally stable physiological properties such as the highly repeatable rapid pH decrease upon carbohydrate addition and subsequent recovery phase, the fundamental approaches to study the oral microbiome have cycled back and forth between community level investigations and characterizing individual model isolates. This review will discuss some of the recent insights into the oral microbiome at a fundamental level, existing knowledge gaps, as well as challenges that have surfaced and the approaches to address them
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