Characterization of the Oral Fungal Microbiome (Mycobiome) in Healthy Individuals

By M. Ghannoum, R. Jurevic, P. Mukherjee, Fan Cui, Masoumeh Sikaroodi, Ammar S. Naqvi, Patrick Gillevet. PLoS Pathogens, 2010

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The oral microbiome–organisms residing in the oral cavity and their collective genome–are critical components of health and disease. The fungal component of the oral microbiota has not been characterized. In this study, we used a novel multitag pyrosequencing approach to characterize fungi present in the oral cavity of 20 healthy individuals, using the pan-fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) primers. Our results revealed the “basal” oral mycobiome profile of the enrolled individuals, and showed that across all the samples studied, the oral cavity contained 74 culturable and 11 non-culturable fungal genera. Among these genera, 39 were present in only one person, 16 genera were present in two participants, and 5 genera were present in three people, while 15 genera (including non-culturable organisms) were present in ≥4 (20%) participants. Candida species were the most frequent (isolated from 75% of participants), followed by Cladosporium (65%), Aureobasidium, Saccharomycetales (50% for both), Aspergillus (35%), Fusarium (30%), and Cryptococcus (20%). Four of these predominant genera are known to be pathogenic in humans. The low-abundance genera may represent environmental fungi present in the oral cavity and could simply be spores inhaled from the air or material ingested with food. Among the culturable genera, 61 were represented by one species each, while 13 genera comprised between 2 and 6 different species; the total number of species identified were 101. The number of species in the oral cavity of each individual ranged between 9 and 23. Principal component (PCO) analysis of the obtained data set followed by sample clustering and UniFrac analysis revealed that White males and Asian males clustered differently from each other, whereas both Asian and White females clustered together. This is the first study that identified the “basal mycobiome” of healthy individuals, and provides the basis for a detailed characterization of the oral mycobiome in health and disease.

Subfields: Periodontics, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/949fb6c8c3598ae4bcfec8a287d99fcc295d9f28

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Citations in the corpus

Network analysis methods for studying microbial communities: A mini review (2021, background): “Until now, bacterial co-occurrence patterns were studied extensively while fungal or viral interactions have received less attention [8,9].”
Experimental and analytical tools for studying the human microbiome (2011, background): “and have generally been targeted to specific taxonomic groups, such as fung”
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The Impact of the Gut Microbiota on Human Health: An Integrative View (2012, neutral): “However, increasing attention is being paid to elucidating the eukaryotic component of the microbiota (Ghannoum et al., 2010; Scanlan and Marchesi, 2008), and recent research is beginning to show that even healthy humans harbor a diverse consortium of viruses that make up the human virome…”
Mortierella elongata's roles in organic agriculture and crop growth promotion in a mineral soil (2018, methodology): “ITS1 region gene was amplified by Primers ITS1F/ ITS2 (Blaalid et al., 2013; Ghannoum et al., 2010).”
ITS as an environmental DNA barcode for fungi: an in silico approach reveals potential PCR biases (2010, background): “Either the ITS1 or the ITS2 region have been targeted in recent high-throughput sequencing studies [14-17], because the entire ITS region is still too long for 454 sequencing or other high-throughput sequencing methods.”
Progress in molecular and morphological taxon discovery in Fungi and options for formal classification of environmental sequences (2011, background): “…recent studies that use the new technology to estimate fungal diversity in various environments (Table 1) (Amend et al., 2010; Bu ee et al., 2009; Ghannoum et al., 2010; Jumpponen and Jones, 2009; Jumpponen et al., 2010; Lumini et al., 2009; €Opik et al., 2009; Rousk et al., 2010; Tedersoo et…”
Bacterial-Fungal Interactions: Hyphens between Agricultural, Clinical, Environmental, and Food Microbiologists (2011, background): “A recent study of 20 healthy individuals revealed a variety of culturable and nonculturable fungi to be present in this setting (130).”
High-Coverage ITS Primers for the DNA-Based Identification of Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes in Environmental Samples (2012, background): “For example, since the average read length obtained from 454 pyrosequencing has until recently been 250 bp, pioneering studies on fungal metagenomics usually target the ITS1 region for DNA barcoding [9,46,51,52].”
Archaea and Fungi of the Human Gut Microbiome: Correlations with Diet and Bacterial Residents (2013, methodology): “Archaeal specific 16S rDNA primers and ITS1 fungal primers were adapted from the literature and used to amplify a rDNA 16S fragment; the final PCR cycling conditions were optimized to maximize specificity [51], [52], [38], [40],(Tables S5 and S6).”
Gut microbiome-host interactions in health and disease (2011, methodology): “Fungal interactions with the distal gut microbiome have yet to be characterized using a metagenomic analysis, although this has been attempted within the oral microbiome using a multitag pyrosequencing approach in 20 healthy individuals [43].”