Abstract
The importance of studying the salivary microbiome has been highlighted for its connection to health and disease and as a potential tool for supplementing human genetic diversity studies. While the salivary microbiome has been studied in various world populations, Indian populations have not been examined. We therefore analyzed microbiome diversity in saliva samples from 92 volunteers from eight different sampling locations in India by amplifying and sequencing variable regions (V1 and V2) of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. The results showed immense bacterial richness in Indian populations; we identified 165 bacterial genera and 785 unique Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs), with substantial sharing among the populations. There were small, but significant correlations in the abundance of bacterial genera in sampling locations from the same geographic region. Most of the core OTUs detected were also observed previously in other populations, but Solobacterium spp., Lachnoanaerobaculum spp. and Alloprevotella spp. were observed to be a component of the saliva microbiome unique to Indian populations. Importantly, nine bacterial genera were observed that were not listed in the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD). These results highlight the importance of analyzing underrepresented populations like those of India.
Highlights
The human body harbors a large number of microbial cells, organized in complex communities termed microbiota, which was previously thought to exceed the human cells by ten times [1]
The results demonstrate that the Indian populations display a high bacterial richness along with substantial sharing of the salivary microbiome among different populations
The number of processed reads and the corresponding counts of bacterial genera and Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) detected in each of the populations are shown in Table 1, and the distribution of major bacterial genera represented as pie charts across the sampling locations is shown in S1 Fig. The sampling sites were further grouped according to their geographical locations within India into three regions viz., (Table 1) Northern India, Eastern India and Southern India
Summary
The human body harbors a large number of microbial cells, organized in complex communities termed microbiota, which was previously thought to exceed the human cells by ten times [1]. A recent study has revised this estimate and proposed that the number of bacterial and human cells in the human body is approximately similar [2]. The bacterial communities differ in their density across various sites in the human body as well as in taxonomic composition and stability [3]. The microbiota of a person differs more at different sites across the body as compared to the interpersonal variation of the microbiome across similar sites [3].
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