Abstract
Recently, high-throughput sequencing has improved the understanding of the microbiological etiology of caries, but the characteristics of the microbial community structure in the human oral cavity with and without caries are not completely clear. To better understand these characteristics, Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing was utilized to analyze 20 salivary samples (10 caries-free and 10 caries) from subjects from the same town in Dongxiang, Gansu, China. A total of 5,113 OTUs (Operational Taxonomic Units, 97% cutoff) were characterized in all of the salivary samples obtained from the 20 subjects. A comparison of the two groups revealed that (i) the predominant phyla were constant between the two groups; (ii) the relative abundance of the genera Veillonella, Bifidobacterium, Selenomonas, Olsenella, Parascardovia, Scardovia, Chryseobacterium, Terrimonas, Burkholderia and Sporobacter was significantly higher in the group with caries (P < 0.05); and (iii) four genera with low relative abundance (< 0.01% on average), including two characteristic genera in caries (Chryseobacterium and Scardovia), significantly influenced the microbial community structure at the genus and OTU levels. Moreover, via co-occurrence and principal component analyses, the co-prevalence of the pathogenic genera was detected in the caries samples, but in the caries-free samples, the function of clustered genera was more random. This result suggests that a synergistic effect may be influencing the assembly of the caries microbial community, whereas competition may play a more dominant role in governing the microbial community in the caries-free group. Our findings regarding the characteristics of the microbial communities of the groups with and without caries might improve the understanding of the microbiological etiology of caries and might improve the prevention and cure of caries in the future.
Highlights
Dental caries, which is mainly caused by bacteria, is a chronic progressive infectious disease in humans and is characterized by high occurrence and wide distribution [1]
The average level of Good’s coverage per sample was over 97%, suggesting that the 16S rRNA gene sequences identified represent the majority of bacterial taxa inhabiting the saliva in the current study
Four diversity indices were calculated from each salivary sample, and an α-diversity comparison indicated that caries and caries-free subjects were did not significantly differ between healthy and caries subjects (S1 Table)
Summary
Dental caries, which is mainly caused by bacteria, is a chronic progressive infectious disease in humans and is characterized by high occurrence and wide distribution [1]. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the results of related studies in recent years have suggested that the composition of the bacterial community may be much more important to the development of caries than the presence of a single potentially pathogenic species [5]. The investigations on the relationship between the microbial community structure and the incidence of dental caries using high-throughput sequencing technologies were more focused on finding differences in the microbial genera, such as Lactobacillus, Rothia, Granulicatella, Actinomyces, Gemella, Haemophilus, and Veillonella [6,7,8,9,10], between caries and caries-free subjects. The living environments of people, including diet, lifestyle, water, soil and other environmental factors, affect the oral microbial community structure and the quantity of flora and microbial virulence [12, 13]. The similarities and differences in the bacterial community diversity, composition and co-prevalence between samples with and without caries were analyzed, providing new insights into microbiological etiology and a new perspective of the prevention of caries
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