Genotyping Oral Commensal Bacteria to Predict Social Contact and Structure.

ABSTRACT: Social network structure is a fundamental determinant of human health, from infectious to chronic diseases. However, quantitative and unbiased approaches to measuring social network structure are lacking. We hypothesized that genetic relatedness of oral commensal bacteria could be used to infer social contact between humans, just as genetic relatedness of pathogens can be used to determine transmission chains of pathogens. We used a traditional, questionnaire survey-based method to characterize the contact network of the School of Public Health at a large research university. We then collected saliva from a subset of individuals to analyze their oral microflora using a modified deep sequencing multilocus sequence typing (MLST) procedure. We examined micro-evolutionary changes in the S. vir

SUBMITTER: Francis SS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5042546 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature