OralOme

: o contributo dos microrganismos revelado por estudos de proteómica

Abstract

The Oral Biofilm is one of the most complex ecosystems on biological surfaces. Its complexity is due to the presence of a large number of bacteria in the oral cavity, which express proteins that interact with each other, with environmental factors and with host proteins. The proteins present in saliva and oral biofilm play specific roles in the oral cavity, revealing the dynamical balance of this ecosystem. The identification of these proteins becomes essential to understand this ecosystem. The recent bioinformatic tool OralCard allows the integration and visualization of published proteomic data of the oral cavity in an organized and interpretive way. The database, which supports this tool, only considers 1346 proteins of microbial origin present in the oral cavity. The remaining bacterial protein in these samples cannot be detected by the traditional approaches. This study aims to collect data from published proteomic studies focused on bacteria found in the oral cavity cultured in vitro in order to enlarge the OralOme database. The results obtained compiled 9818 proteins of microbial origin, which are briefly described as to the species they were isolated from and also their ontological classifications. These proteins were added to the OralOme database. Aside from the update of the OralOme database this study concluded that: i) the number of proteins identified as being expressed by bacteria in vitro cultures is larger than the number previously stored in OralOme; ii) the genus for which the majority of proteins were identified was Streptococcus and the species was Porphyromonas gingivalis; iii) the species to which more proteins were allocated are related either to oral or to systemic diseases; iv) the ontological annotation of bacterial proteins is still very unspecific and there are many proteins with abstract classifications.

Date of Award	7 Jul 2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria José Correia (Supervisor) & Edgar Duarte Coelho (Supervisor)