Published in

American Society for Microbiology, mSphere, 5(5), 2020

DOI: 10.1128/msphere.00451-20

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Assessing the Variation within the Oral Microbiome of Healthy Adults

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The human oral cavity is inhabited by a diverse community of microbes, known as the human oral microbiome. These microbes play a role in maintaining both oral and systemic health and, as such, have been proposed to be useful biomarkers of disease. However, to identify these biomarkers, we first need to determine the composition and variation of the healthy oral microbiome. In this report, we investigate the oral microbiome of 1,049 healthy individuals to determine which genera and amplicon sequence variants are commonly found between individual oral microbiomes. We then further investigate how lifestyle, anthropometric, and dietary choices impact overall microbiome composition. Interestingly, the results from this investigation showed that while many features were significantly associated with oral microbiome composition, no single biological factor explained a variation larger than 2%. These results indicate that future work on biomarker detection may be encouraged by the lack of strong confounding factors.