Pyrosequencing Analysis of Oral Microbial Communities of Wild type and Toll Like Receptor 2-deficient mice using 454 GS FLX Titanium System. mouse_oral

Background: Although mice have long served as an animal model for periodontitis, information on the composition of their indigenous oral microbiota is limited. The aim of the current study was to characterize mouse oral bacterial flora by applying massively parallel pyrosequencing using the last version of the pyrosequencer, Roche/454 Genome Sequencer FLX Titanium. In addition, the effect of TLR2 deficiency on oral microbiota was evaluated. Results: Eight oral bacterial communities of wild-type (n=4) and TLR2 knock-out (n=4) C57BL/6 mice were characterized by analyzing 80,046 reads of 16S rRNA genes with an average length of 443 bp, excluding PCR primers, obtained by pyrosequencing. The average species richness of murine oral bacterial community was estimated to be about 200 but the communities were dominated by only two main phyla and several species, thus relatively simple. The bacterial composition of murine oral microbiota was significantly different from that of humans, and the lack of TLR2 had a negligible effect on the murine oral microbiota. Conclusion: Pyrosequencing using the Roche/454 FLX Titanium was successfully applied to characterize mouse oral bacterial communities. The relatively simple oral bacterial communities of mice were not affected by TLR2 gene, which will provide a basis for future studies to understand the role of periodontal pathogens in the murine model of periodontitis.