Citizen science charts two major \u201cstomatotypes\u201d in the oral microbiome of adolescents and reveals links with habits and drinking water composition

Jesse R Willis,Luis A Bejarano,Susana Iraola-Guzmán,Pedro González-Torres,Toni Gabaldón,Antonio Hermoso,Jochen Hecht,Carlo Carolis,Magda Montfort,Miriam Alloza-Trabado,Luca Cozzuto,Núria Andreu ,Ewa Księżopolska ,Antònia Valentín ,Harris Onywera,Alexandros A Pittis,Julia Ponomarenko,Annick Labeeuw,Ester Saus

doi:10.1186/s40168-018-0592-3

Abstract

BackgroundThe oral cavity comprises a rich and diverse microbiome, which plays important roles in health and disease. Previous studies have mostly focused on adult populations or in very young children, whereas the adolescent oral microbiome remains poorly studied. Here, we used a citizen science approach and 16S profiling to assess the oral microbiome of 1500 adolescents around Spain and its relationships with lifestyle, diet, hygiene, and socioeconomic and environmental parameters.ResultsOur results provide a detailed snapshot of the adolescent oral microbiome and how it varies with lifestyle and other factors. In addition to hygiene and dietary habits, we found that the composition of tap water was related to important changes in the abundance of several bacterial genera. This points to an important role of drinking water in shaping the oral microbiota, which has been so far poorly explored. Overall, the microbiome samples of our study can be clustered into two broad compositional patterns (stomatotypes), driven mostly by Neisseria and Prevotella, respectively. These patterns show striking similarities with those found in unrelated populations.ConclusionsWe hypothesize that these stomatotypes represent two possible global optimal equilibria in the oral microbiome that reflect underlying constraints of the human oral niche. As such, they should be found across a variety of geographical regions, lifestyles, and ages.

Highlights

The oral cavity comprises a rich and diverse microbiome, which plays important roles in health and disease
Tap water influences the oral microbiome Unexpectedly, we found no significant differences between lifestyle of students with the two oral stomatotypes, suggesting our data have not sufficiently captured the key factors underlying these different microbial communities
We have shown that a number of diet and hygiene factors are associated with alterations in the composition of the oral microbiome, though one caveat is that, since the bulk of the sample set is from adolescents, some habits may be too recently developed to have already had a strong impact

Summary

Introduction

The oral cavity comprises a rich and diverse microbiome, which plays important roles in health and disease. We used a citizen science approach and 16S profiling to assess the oral microbiome of 1500 adolescents around Spain and its relationships with lifestyle, diet, hygiene, and socioeconomic and environmental parameters. The mouth comprises several distinct niches, previous large-scale studies have mostly probed microbial composition of saliva This fluid can gather bacteria and metabolites that originate from other oral niches, and appear to be representative of the overall oral microbiome [23]. We used a citizen science approach and 16S metabarcoding to assess the composition of the microbiome of the oral cavity among teenagers in Spain. Our study showcases the use of a citizen science approach to generate hypotheses that can be further validated in subsequent studies

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion