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.

FIG. 1.

One-day infected primary gingival epithelial cells (actin-red, nuclei-blue) harboring a high number of intracellular Porphyromonas gingivalis bacteria (green) undergo successful mitosis as determined by confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy. White arrows indicate the division of parent nucleus into two daughter nuclei. Scale bar = 10 μm. (This figure is reproduced from Yilmaz, , with permission from Microbiology, Society for General Microbiology.) Color images available online at www.liebertonline.com/dna.