Researchers are closely monitoring the genomes of microbial communities in the human mouth

Bacteria often show very strong biography – some bacteria are abundant in specific locations while others are absent – big questions arise when applying microbiology in therapies or probiotics: how did the bacteria go to the wrong place? When biology is ‘absent’, how do we add the right bacteria?

These questions, however, are a major hurdle, given that bacteria are so small and so diverse and so complex that they pose a huge challenge in understanding which subgroups of bacteria live and which genes or metabolic abilities give them this ‘wrong’. Lets bloom in places? .

In a new study published in Genome Biology Researchers led by Harvard University examined the human oral microbiome and found impressive diversity in the subspecies of bacteria living in certain areas of the mouth.

“As microbial ecologists, we are fascinated by the fact that bacteria can divide almost any habitat into different structures, but as humans, we also have this innate curiosity about how microbial patterns live in our bodies,” said lead author Daniel R. . Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Organic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

Recent developments in sequencing and bioinformatics approaches have provided new ways to unravel the complexity of bacterial communities. Terter and Colin Kevnoh, Professor of Biology, Department of Biology and Developmental Sciences, Harvard University. To implement the state in collaboration with researchers from Jeffrey, University of Chicago, Woods Hall and Forsyth Institute. The art of sequencing and analysis approaches to get a better picture of the oral microbiome.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, a. According to Murat Aren, “there is a large space for the study of microbial communities.” “It’s not just the beginning of the GI tract, but it’s also a very specific and small environment that’s so microbially diverse that we can really start answering interesting questions about microbiome and its evolution.”

The mouth contains surprising amounts of site-specific microbes in different areas. For example, the germs found on the tongue are very different from the germs found on plaque on teeth. “The germs on your tongue are more similar to the ones that live on someone’s tongue than the ones that live in your throat or on your pumice!” Said Aren.

The team falsified public databases and downloaded 100 genomes that represent four species of bacteria commonly found in the mouth, Haemophilus parainfluenza And three oral species of the genus Rothia, And used as a reference for the investigation of their relatives who took samples from the mouths of hundreds of volunteers from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP).

“We have used these genomes as a starting point, but have quickly gone beyond them to investigate the total genetic diversity between the millions of bacterial cells that live in our mouths,” North said. “Because, at the end of the day, the only ones we’re curious about are not the arbitrary few made up, respectively.”

Using this recently developed approach, known as metapenomics, allows researchers to manage the pathogenesis with metagenomics (the study of total DNA from all bacteria in a community).

“We got a lot of diversity,” North said. “But we were amazed at the pattern of that variability in different parts of the movable; especially between the tongue, cheek and tooth surface.”

For example, in the same microbial animal, researchers found different genetic variants that were strongly associated with the same, different site inside the mouth. In many cases, the team was able to identify a handful of genes that could explain the specific habitat of a particular bacterial group. Using metapangenomics, the researchers were also able to identify free-living bacteria in people’s mouths from their lab-grown relatives.

“The resolution given by these techniques – by direct comparison of the genomes of” pets “and” wild “bacteria – allows us to disperse these differences by genes,” Kevanoff notes. “We were also able to identify the bacterial strains of the associated novelty, but differently than the culture we are in.”

“After identifying some strong bacterial candidates who can determine adaptation to a particular habitat, we want to test these hypotheses experimentally,” Kevanoff said. These findings could be the key to unlocking potentially targeted probiotics, where scientists can use what can be learned about the microbial habitat needs to engineer beneficial microbes to land in specific habitats.

“It’s so easy that people have been working on bacteria from the mouth for a long time,” said Jessica Mark Welch, an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

“Every environment we see has these really complex, complex communities of bacteria, but why is that?” Said Mark Welch. “Because these communities are so complex and understanding how different bacteria interact will help us better understand how to fix a bacterial community that harms our health, which needs to be removed or reintroduced into microbes.

This study and others like it can provide new insights into the role of oral microbes in human health. “The ability to identify specific genes behind habit trait adaptation has been somewhat ‘sacred grail’ in microbial ecology. We are very excited for the contribution we have made in this area!”