Dealing with mouth bacteria

 

Bacteria that live in the mouth have a way of changing their mode of operation when their host is ill. A research carried out at the Texas Advanced Computing Center using supercomputers has proved this fact. Scientists are of the opinion that these findings could help to a great extent in the prevention and even in reversing gum diseases like periodontitis, Crohn’s disease and diabetes.

A professor of molecular biosciences and director of the Centre for Infectious Disease, University of Texas at Austin, Marvin Whitely was the leader of the study, which was published in the journal mBio.

Professor Whitely said that what he and his team were trying to figure out was how those mouth bacteria act when their hosts are healthy, and when they are ill. What they discovered, according to him “is that they do act very differently.”

“As bacteria interact, they share nutrients they share nutrients and one species can even feed on another,” Whitely said. “The thing that we found in this paper,” he continued, “is that this sharing, and how they interact with each other changes quite drastically in disease than it does in health.”

The researchers at University of Texas at Austin in their research employed shotgun metagenomic sequencing, a non-targeted method to study all the genetic material of the bacterial communities. Prof. Whitely and his team analyzed the RNA collected with the Lonestar and Stampede supercomputers at Texas Advanced Computing Center.

“The easiest way to think of it is just the collection of bacteria that are in or on your body. We think of it as not only the bacteria, but the genetic composition. What’s their DNA? From that we can infer what these bacteria might be doing for us.” Whitely said.