SALIVA Raw sequence reads. SALIVA

Healthy individuals have little reason to learn about microbial communities present in their bodies. It is only when the balance between the microbiota and the host is impaired, in the case of disease, that people become aware of that presence. The evidence accumulated in numerous studies established the role of smoking in escalating the risk of oral diseases like cancer, mainly because smoking alters the microbial attributes of the oral cavity by decreasing the commensal population while at the same time increasing pathogens. This study aims to investigate the shift in the salivary microbiota between smokers and non-smokers as a predictor to any oral diseases. High-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) for V3-V4 hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA gene was adopted in this study