Periodontitis is an infection-induced inflammatory disease that causes loss of the tooth supporting tissues. Much focus has been put on comparison of the microbial biofilm in the healthy periodontium with the diseased one. The information arising from such studies is limited due to difficulties to compare the microbial composition in these two completely different ecological niches. A few longi...

The role of fecal microbial transplant (FMT) in the treatment of pediatric gastrointestinal disease has become increasingly popular among pediatric practitioners, patients, and parents. The success of FMT for the treatment of recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (RCDI) has bolstered interest in its potential application to other disease states, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). FMT...

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are chronic inflammatory conditions of the gastrointestinal tract that occur in genetically susceptible individuals. Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are two major types of IBD. In about 20-25% of patients, disease onset is during childhood and pediatric IBD can be considered the best model for studying immunopathogentic mechanisms. The fundame...

Human-associated microbial communities play important roles in health and disease. Antibiotic administration is arguably one of the most important modifiable determinants of the composition of the human microbiota. However, quantitatively modeling antibiotic use to account for its impact on microbial community dynamics presents a challenge. We used antibiotic therapy of chronic lung infection i...

Periodontitis is characterized by chronic inflammation associated with alteration of the oral microbiota. In contrast to previous microbiome studies focusing a priori on comparison between extreme phenotypes, our study analyzed a random sample of 85 people. The aim of this study was to link microbial differences to disease's prevalence and severity. Using next generation sequencing of 16S rRNA ...

BACKGROUND Analysis of saliva is emerging as a promising tool to diagnose and monitor diseases which makes determination of the salivary microbial profile in different scenarios essential. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of age, periodontal disease, sex, smoking, and medical conditions on the salivary microbial profile. DESIGN A randomly selected sample of 441 individuals was enrolled (51...

The study of microbial pathogenesis has been primarily a reductionist science since Koch's principles. Reductionist approaches are essential to identify the causal agents of infectious disease, their molecular mechanisms of action, and potential drug targets, and much of medicine's success in the treatment of infectious disease stems from that approach. But many bacteria-caused diseases cannot ...

The spermosphere represents a short-lived, rapidly changing, and microbiologically dynamic zone of soil surrounding a germinating seed. It is analogous to the rhizosphere, being established largely by the carbon compounds released into the soil once the seed begins to hydrate. These seed exudations drive the microbial activities that take place in the spermosphere, many of which can have long-l...

The influence of the gut microbiome on metabolic and behavioral traits is widely accepted, though the microbiome-derived metabolites involved remain unclear. We carried out untargeted urine 1H-NMR spectroscopy-based metabolic phenotyping in an isogenic C57BL/6J mouse population (n = 50) and show that microbial-host co-metabolites are prodromal (i.e., early) markers predicting future divergence ...

The gut microbiota provides essential signals for the development and appropriate function of the immune system. Through this critical contribution to immune fitness, the gut microbiota has a key role in health and disease. Recent advances in the technological applications to study microbial communities and their functions have contributed to a rapid increase in host-microbiota research. Althou...