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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Infectious Agents and Disease
Volume 15 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1418261
This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring Oral Microbiota Dysbiosis as a Risk Factor for Oral and Non-Communicable Diseases View all 7 articles
Bacterial dynamics in the progression of caries to apical periodontitis in primary teeth of children with severe early childhood caries
Provisionally accepted- 1 Peking University Hospital of Stomatology, Beijing, China
- 2 China Agricultural University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
Background: Early childhood caries (ECC) are a prevalent chronic disease in young children. However, there has been limited research on the microbiota in different tissue levels of the same tooth in children with ECC. This study aimed to investigate the dynamic changes in bacterial diversity during the progression of Severe Early Childhood Caries (S-ECC) within the same tooth, from the tooth surface to the root canal, by collecting tissue samples from different areas of the affected tooth.Method: Twenty primary teeth with periapical periodontitis were selected from 20 children aged 3 to 5 years, with 100 samples collected from the different layers: uncavitated buccal enamel surface without white spot lesion (surface), the outermost layer of the dentin carious lesion (superficial), the inner layer of carious dentin (deep), necrotic pulp tissue (pulp), and root exudate (exudate). The taxonomy of each OTU representative sequence was analyzed against the 16S rRNA database. Comparisons of alpha diversity between groups were performed. The number of shared and unique genera between groups counted. Beta diversity was contrasted to evaluate differences in bacterial community composition, and the relationships between the microbiota and samples were analyzed. The heatmap analysis of the 30 most abundant genera was used, which highlighted their relative distribution and abundance. The significantly abundant taxa (phylum to genera) of bacteria among the different groups were identified. The differences of relative abundance between bacterial genera among the five groups were analyzed. Significant Spearman correlations were noted, and visualization of the cooccurrence network was conducted.Recsults: Bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequencing showed that most genera were present in all layers, with the number of shared genera increasing as the disease advanced. The bacterial communities and core genera in the co-occurrence network changed with progression to severe ECC.An increase in both the quantity and complexity of bacterial interactions was observed. This study emphasized the importance of paying attention to the relationship between microbial species rather than just checking changes in bacterial species structure when investigating the role of bacteria in disease progression.
Keywords: Severe early childhood caries, apical periodontitis, bacterial inter-reaction, Co-occurrence network, 16S rRNA squencing
Received: 16 Apr 2024; Accepted: 10 Jul 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 LIN, Wang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yi fei Zhang, Peking University Hospital of Stomatology, Beijing, China
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