Global studies of oral microbial diversity on caries active patients .

Caries is one of the irreversible and long-term oral diseases characterized by the destruction of dental hard tissues. Altered oral microbiota has been proposed to mediate caries; however, the precise mechanism of caries remains unclear, and caries-specific microbiota, metabolites, and their interactions remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we performed metagenomic (n = 62) and metabolomic (n = 32) profiling of plaque samples based on caries-affected patients and caries-free control cohorts. Metagenomic data showed obvious dysbiosis of microbiota in caries-active patients and Prevotella spp. showed significant correlated with caries activity and relative abundance of Streptococcus mutans in dental plaque. We further identified Prevotella spp. were also the key connectors in caries-active derived microbiota network. Moreover, dysregulated carbohydrate metabolism, especially starch catabolism associated function genes, was found to be correlated with both caries activity. Intriguingly, these genes were mainly expressed by Prevotella spp. Last but not least, we found supragingival microbiota and metabolites showing significant differences has great power to distinguish caries-active patients from healthy controls.Collectively, our study revealed supragingival microbiota and metabolites alterations, highlighted the massive alterations of these, which empower to recognize caries-active patients suggested potential roles of microbiota dysbiosis in caries pathogenesis, and offered new clues to understand inter-species interaction in this process. Our study provided a valuable resource for future studies, and would facilitate facilitate potential clinical applications of featured microbiota and (or)metabolites to conduct precision medicine on caries-active population.