The Influence of Different Pore Sizes of Bovine Bone Scaffold Material on the Oral Microbiota

Abstract

Bone scaffolds are a kind of bone repair material, but bone scaffold infection is a common and serious clinical problem that has not been well studied in the context of the oral microbiota. We prepared two different bone scaffold materials with different pore sizes from adult and fetal bovine cancellous bones and compared them with hydroxyapatite (HA) powder. After incubation, we facilitated the initial colonization by the oral microbiota on the three materials by using the saliva of healthy people. Through high-throughput sequencing and analysis, we found that the different pore sizes of the bone scaffold materials had a certain influence on the initial colonization by the oral microbiota, affecting β-diversity and functional profiles. Redundancy analysis (RDA) and cooccurrence analysis indicated that initial microbial colonization by the oral microbiota in fetal bone scaffold materials with smaller pore sizes was more likely to cause infection. In addition, there may be some functional bacteria that play an interactive role in early colonization by the oral microflora in bone scaffold materials, such as those of the genera Bacillus and Lactobacillus.