Extensive research has focused on the compositional changes in dental plaque microbiome communities during the transition from health to disease, known as dysbiosis. However, alterations in the spatial composition of these communities throughout the progression from health to disease remain under-explored. We describe an in vitro dental plaque model for culturing oral biofilms seeded with dental plaque from human volunteers. Our model recapitulates important features of the in vivo environment including shear force induced by salivary flow over teeth and the nutritional milieu experienced by microbes that inhabit the transitional zone between supragingival and subgingival aspects of the teeth. Importantly, our model is amenable to multiplex fluorescent labeling and multispectral imaging for testing specific hypotheses regarding systems-level community structure and function. The model allows for precise manipulation of various environmental conditions, such as flow rate and nutrient availability to investigate their effects on biofilm development and spatial structure. Furthermore, this model can be used to test the effects of various therapeutic interventions, e.g., antimicrobial agents, on the biofilm composition and structure at the micron to millimeter scale, making it a valuable tool for studying the molecular and cellular basis of dental plaque-mediated diseases and for benchmarking new therapeutic interventions. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Dental plaque-on-a-chip in vitro model culture system Support Protocol: Gingival margin (GM) medium preparation Basic Protocol 2: Microcosm labeling and multispectral image acquisition.
Keywords: biofilms; dental plaque; in vitro models; oral microbiology; spectral imaging.
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