ArticlemSystems2021
Quantifying Live Microbial Load in Human Saliva Samples over Time Reveals Stable Composition and Dynamic Load.
Article in mSystems, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Relationship Between the Gut Microbiome and the Aqua Cultured Fish, General Prospects Toward Fish Health: A Systematic Review.Applied biochemistry and biotechnology · 2025Pooled it
- Population-based characterisation of child and adolescent oral bacterial microbiomes.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Scale reliant mixed effects models enhance microbiome data analysis.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Electrolyzed saline coolant mitigates bacterial airborne deposition in dental procedures.Frontiers in oral health · 2026Article
- Targeting the Gut Microbiota's Role in Host Energy Absorption With Precision Nutrition Interventions for the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity.Nutrition reviews · 2025Review
- Uncertainty Modeling Outperforms Machine Learning for Microbiome Data Analysis.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Assessing the safety of microbiome perturbations.Microbial genomics · 2025Review
- Absolute quantification of the living skin microbiome overcomes relic-DNA bias and reveals specific patterns across volunteers.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Smartphone Biosensors for Non-Invasive Drug Monitoring in Saliva.Biosensors · 2025Article
- Impact of Saharan Dust andInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Modulation of the Human Microbiome: Probiotics, Prebiotics, and Microbial Transplants.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2025Review
- Does Fusobacterium in Colorectal Cancer Sites Originate From the Oral Cavity? A Pilot Study.Clinical and experimental dental research · 2024Article
- Nepali oral microbiomes reflect a gradient of lifestyles from traditional to industrialized.Microbiome · 2024Article
- Illumina Sequencing in Conjunction with Propidium Monoazide to Identify Live Bacteria After Antiseptic Treatment in a Complex Oral Biofilm: A Study Using an Ex Vivo Supragingival Biofilm Model.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Analytical challenges in omics research on asthma and allergy: A National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases workshop.The Journal of allergy and clinical immunology · 2024Article
- DNA from non-viable bacteria biases diversity estimates in the corals Acropora loripes and Pocillopora acuta.Environmental microbiome · 2023Article
- synDNA-a Synthetic DNA Spike-in Method for Absolute Quantification of Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing.mSystems · 2022Article
- A Reproducible and Tunable Synthetic Soil Microbial Community Provides New Insights into Microbial Ecology.mSystems · 2022Article
- Microbiota succession throughout life from the cradle to the grave.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2022Review
- Diurnal and eating-associated microbial patterns revealed via high-frequency saliva sampling.Genome research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Evaluating microbial community composition through next-generation sequencing has become increasingly accessible. However, metagenomic sequencing data sets provide researchers with only a snapshot of a dynamic ecosystem and do not provide information about the total microbial number, or load, of a sample. Additionally, DNA can be detected long after a microorganism is dead, making it unsafe to assume that all microbial sequences detected in a community came from living organisms. By combining relic DNA removal by propidium monoazide (PMA) with microbial quantification with flow cytometry, we present a novel workflow to quantify live microbial load in parallel with metagenomic sequencing. We applied this method to unstimulated saliva samples, which can easily be collected longitudinally and standardized by passive collection time. We found that the number of live microorganisms detected in saliva was inversely correlated with salivary flow rate and fluctuated by an order of magnitude throughout the day in healthy individuals. In an acute perturbation experiment, alcohol-free mouthwash resulted in a massive decrease in live bacteria, which would have been missed if we did not consider dead cell signal. While removing relic DNA from saliva samples did not greatly impact the microbial composition, it did increase our resolution among samples collected over time. These results provide novel insight into the dynamic nature of host-associated microbiomes and underline the importance of applying scale-invariant tools in the analysis of next-generation sequencing data sets.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.