Oral Microbiota Analyses of Pediatric Saudi Population Reveals Signatures of Dental Caries. DENTAL CARIES MICROBIOTA

Oral microbiome sequencing has revealed key links between microbiome dysfunction and dental caries. However, these efforts have largely focused on Western populations, with few studies on the Middle Eastern communities. Oral microbiota composition and abundance were identified in 250 Saudi participants with high dental caries and 150 with low dental caries using 16S rRNA sequencing and attempted to build a classifier using random forest models to assess diagnostic utility. The ADONIS test results indicate that there was no significant association between sex and Bray-Curtis dissimilarity (p ~ 0.93), but there was a significant association with dental caries status (p ~ 0.001). Using an alpha level of 0.05, five differentially abundant operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified between males and females as the main effect along with four differentially abundant OTUs between high and low dental caries. The mean metrics for the optimal hyperparameter combination using the model with only differentially abundant OTUs were: Accuracy (0.701); Matthew’s correlation coefficient (0.0509); AUC (0.517) and F1 score (0.821) while the mean metrics for random forest model using all OTUs were:0.675; 0.054; 0.611 and 0.796 respectively. The assessment of oral microbiota samples in a representative Saudi Arabian population for high and low metrics of caries yields signatures of abundances and diversity.