Simple but important paper on the personal microbiome

Figure 1.

Quick post.  Just saw this paper:

PLOS ONE: The Personal Human Oral Microbiome Obscures the Effects of Treatment on Periodontal Disease:

Schwarzberg K, Le R, Bharti B, Lindsay S, Casaburi G, et al. (2014) The Personal Human Oral Microbiome Obscures the Effects of Treatment on Periodontal Disease. PLoS ONE 9(1): e86708. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086708

It has multiple things of interest (certainly to me – as we are doing some work on the oral microbiome). But I do not have time right now to dig through all of it.  I want to just point out one very important line in it:

Our results highlight how understanding interpersonal variability among microbiomes is necessary for determining how polymicrobial diseases respond to treatment and disturbance

This is consistent with what has been a gut feeling of mine (and something I say in lots of interviews and talks) but for which I did not have any obvious citation in mind.  Now I do.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen