Oxidative stress in the oral cavity is driven by individualspecific bacterial communities

The term “bacterial dysbiosis” is being used quite extensively in metagenomic studies, however, the identification of harmful bacteria often fails due to large overlap between the bacterial species found in healthy volunteers and patients. We hypothesized that the pathogenic oral bacteria are individual-specific and they correlate with oxidative stress markers in saliva which reflect the inflammatory processes in the oral cavity. Temporally direct and lagged correlations between the markers and bacterial taxa were computed individually for 26 volunteers who provided saliva samples during one month (21.2 ± 2.7 samples/volunteer, 551 samples in total). The volunteers’ microbiomes differed sig…