Patient-specific Analysis of Periodontal and Peri-implant

clinicAl inVESTiGATiOnS Abstract: Periodontally involved teeth have been implicated as ‘microbial res-ervoirs ’ in the etiology of peri-implant diseases. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation was to use a deep-sequencing approach to identify the degree of congruence between adjacent peri-implant and periodontal micro-biomes in states of health and disease. Subgingival and peri-implant biofilm samples were collected from 81 par-tially edentulous individuals with peri-odontal and peri-implant health and disease. Bacterial DNA was isolated, and the 16S rRNA gene was amplified and sequenced by pyrotag sequencing. Chimera-depleted sequences were com-pared against a locally hosted curated database for bacterial identification. Statistical significance was determined by paired Student’s t tests between tooth-implant pairs. The 1.9 mil-lion sequences identified represented 523 species. Sixty percent of individu-als shared less than 50 % of all species between their periodontal and peri-implant biofilms, and 85 % of individ-uals shared less than 8 % of abundant species between tooth and implant. Additionally, the periodontal microbi-ome demonstrated significantly higher diversity than the implant, and distinct bacterial lineages were associated with health and disease in each ecosystem. Analysis of our data suggests that sim-ple geographic proximity is not a suf-ficient determinant of colonization of topographically distinct niches, and that the peri-implant and periodontal microbiomes represent microbiologi-cally distinct ecosystems. Key Words: dental implants, phyloge-netic biogeography, peri-implantitis, peri