The Oral Microbiota: Living with a Permanent Guest

Abstract

The oral cavity of healthy individuals contains hundreds of different bacterial, viral, and fungal species. Many of these can associate to form biofilms, which are resistant to mechanical stress or antibiotic treatment. Most are also commensal species, but they can become pathogenic in responses to changes in the environment or other triggers in the oral cavity, including the quality of an individual’s personal hygiene. The complexity of the oral microbiome is being characterized through the newly developed tools of metagenomics. How the microbiome of the oral cavity contributes to health and disease is attracting the interest of a growing number of cell biologists, microbiologists, and immunologists.

Distinct cutaneous bacterial assemblages in a sampling of South American Amerindians and US residents

“…The development of tools for high throughput DNA sequencing and computational support for the vast data sets thus generated has overcome the limitation of previous culture-based microbiological studies of the human skin (Leyden et al, 1981(Leyden et al, , 1987Kearney et al, 1984;Roth and James, 1988;Chiller et al, 2001), and has renewed interest in the characterization of the human cutaneous microbiome using culture-independent techniques (Dethlefsen et al, 2007;Oakley et al, 2008;Avila et al, 2009;Hamady and Knight, 2009;Nasidze et al, 2009;Peterson et al, 2009;Turnbaugh et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2009;Qin et al, 2010). Investigators now are using molecular, DNA-based methodologies to assess the microbial populations present in and on human skin (Fredricks, 2001;Paulino et al, 2006Paulino et al, , 2008Gao et al, 2007Gao et al, , 2008Gao et al, , 2010Fierer et al, 2008Fierer et al, , 2010Grice et al, 2008Grice et al, , 2009Costello et al, 2009;Grice and Segre, 2011).…”

An In vitro Comparative Evaluation of Disinfectants on Standard and Clinical Microbial Strains on Heat Cure Resins

“…Following the organism identification, confirmation was done by growing them in selective culture media [Table/ Fig-1,4]. The para meters of optical density corresponding to suspensions of 1x10 6 CFU of each micro-organism were spectrophotometrically observed in sterile saline solution. Each sterile resin specimen was then transferred to a tube containing tryptic soy broth and sabouraud dextrose broth respectively and inoculated with 0.1 ml of the standardized suspension of each micro-organism [Table/ Fig-6].…”

“…Candida albicans and Streptococcus mutans are common inhabitants of oral microflora and are known to adhere to acrylic denture surfaces and to mucosa [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Photo Inactivation of Streptococcus mutans Biofilm by Violet-Blue light

“…The human oral cavity is a cornucopia of microbes with a symbiotic relationship to the human host [4,32]. Commensal oral microbes share space in the oral cavity in a state of quiescence, protecting the human host from pathogenic bacteria [19].…”

“…These nonpathogenic bacteria have the potential to become pathogenic, when factors related to changes in the oral environment disrupt their homeostasis [43]. Dental plaque, a common term for oral biofilm, is an aggregate of microbes found on the tooth surface embedded in a matrix of polymers of bacterial and salivary origin that interacts with the environment and host [4,27,28,29]. Oral microbial biofilm has been established to be an etiological factor for dental caries and other oral diseases [34].…”