Most studies have, however, relied on the analysis of dental calculus as one particular material type particularly prone to the molecular preservation of ancient microbial biofilms and potential of entire teeth for microbial characterization, both of healthy communities and pathogens in ancient individuals, remains overlooked. In this study, we used shotgun sequencing to characterize the bacterial composition from historical subjects showing macroscopic evidence of oral pathologies.
We first carried out a macroscopic analysis aimed at identifying carious or periodontal diseases in subjects belonging to a French rural population of the 18th century AD.
We next examined radiographically six subjects showing specific, characteristic dental pathologies and applied HTS shotgun sequencing to characterize the microbial communities present in and on the dental material. The presence of Streptococcus mutans and also Rothia dentocariosa , Actinomyces viscosus , Porphyromonas gingivalis , Tannerella forsythia , Pseudoramibacter alactolyticus , Olsenella uli and Parvimonas micra was confirmed through the presence of typical signatures of post-mortem DNA damage at an average depth-of-coverage ranging from 0.
Each sampled tooth showed a specific bacterial signature associated with carious or periodontal pathologies. This work demonstrates that from a healthy independent tooth, without visible macroscopic pathology, we can identify a signature of specific pathogens and deduce the oral health status of an individual. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Dental medicine has an active branch of research focusing on the characterization of bacteria and oral biofilms because they are associated with the most common oral pathologies: caries, periapical and periodontal diseases [ 1 ]. Such oral pathologies are extremely frequent amongst the populations of industrialized countries and have a major impact on the individual well-being and health care provisions [ 1 , 2 ].
