The Oral Bacteriome

Abstract

The oral microbiome has garnered significant interest in recent years. Its profound implications for oral and systemic diseases have led to a considerable amount of research and analysis aimed at providing deeper insights into its composition. This study aimed to characterize oral bacterial communities comprehensively based on microorganisms indexed in the Human Oral Microbiome Database, which was systematically analyzed, and its taxonomic classification was used to describe the diversity of indexed bacteria in the oral cavity. A total of 522 bacteria were considered for the analysis. Among these, 49.04% were named, whereas 29.12% represent uncultivated phylotypes. The taxonomic characterization revealed that more than 80% of total taxa are distributed across five phyla: Bacillota, Bacteroidota, Actinomycetota, Pseudomonadota, and Fusobacteriota. Of these, Bacillota and Bacteroidota are the dominant ones with, respectively, 166 (31.80%) and 96 (18.39%) bacterial taxa. With the recent advances in genomics and bioinformatics, the HOMD is constantly updated, further enhancing our understanding of the bacterial community of the oral microbiome. However, the considerable diversity of the oral microbiome may present analytical challenges and the possible misperception of the implications of closely related species/subspecies in oral and systemic health.