Scientists know more today than ever before about the microbes that inhabit our mouths. They know so much, in fact, that gathering all of the relevant bits of information into one place when designing experiments can be a labor-intensive job in itself. Now, grantees of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their international colleagues intend to solve this problem with the launch of the first comprehensive database of the oral microbiome, or the approximately 600 distinct microorganisms currently known to live in the mouth. The free online compendium is called the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD), and it is the digital equivalent of an Oxford dictionary of oral microorganisms, providing detailed biological entries for each species and an extensive catalogue of the thousands of genes that these microbes express. The Web site, homd.org, is overseen by scientists at The Forsyth Institute in Boston and King’s College London in England. HOMD also introduces the first comprehensive nomenclature system to bring order to the naming of uncultured or previously unnamed oral microbes. The standardized numbering system helps to eliminate the babel of confusing names and uninformative database designations that have frustrated scientists and sometimes hindered their research. The database also categorizes each microbe by its 16S rRNA sequence, a distinctive fingerprint of genetic information that scientists have used for the past 2 decades to identify microorganisms. This sequence information allows the microbes to be placed in a family tree that shows how they are related to one another. For those organisms whose DNA has been sequenced, HOMD provides online tools to view and analyze all of their genes and proteins. Each category of information in the database is interlinked, readily searchable, and appropriately annotated and will be frequently updated to remain current. The oral microbiome is currently better understood than those of other sites in the body, such as the intestine. Since oral microorganisms appear in infections throughout the human body, the HOMD database certainly will be useful to physicians. Like-ise, microbiologists in industry will find HOMD helpful because oral microbes sometimes contaminate food or the drug manufacturing process.
(Source: NIDCR news release, March 25, 2008)
