Your mouth serves as a vital conduit between your body’s interior and the outside world. Your oral cavity is where everything you breathe, chew, or drink interacts, including the proteins and microbes that can harm us. When things go wrong, the consequences can be as mild as bad breath, as serious as tooth and gum decay, or as severe as more severe effects on the gut and other body parts.
We still know very little about the intricate interactions between host and microbes in the complex physiological environment of the mouth, despite the fact that the oral microbiome serves a crucial role as the front-line defense for human health and disease. A better understanding of these interactions is essential to the development of human disease treatments.
One of the most prevalent proteins in our saliva binds to the surface of specific