FLICKR, FEATHEREDTAROral infections have previously been found to correlate with ethnicity, and now researchers from The Ohio State University found that this correlation may be partly rooted in causation: ethnicity appears to actually determine colonization of the mouth microbiome. The team reported its findings in PLOS ONE this week (October 23).
Purnima Kumar and her colleagues sequenced dental plaque and saliva samples from 192 people in the U.S. representing four major ethnicities—non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites, Chinese, and Latinos—finding apparent ethnicity-specific clustering of microbial communities in biofilms isolated from the samples. The researchers also found that a machine-learning classifier was able to reliably identify a person’s ethnicity based on their subgingival microbes.
“People’s background—in terms of foods they ate and other lifestyle trends—didn’t seem to have any correlation with the bacterial communities in their mouths,” reported Surprising Science. “But their ethnicity and thus their similar genetics matched their microbiome more often than chance.”
“This is the first time it has been shown that ethnicity is a huge component in determining what you carry in your mouth. We ...
