Periodontal Microbiology—The Lid’s off the Box Again

A little over 30 years ago, the world of periodontal research was a very different place from the one that we inhabit now. We still had to wait over a decade before the first full genome sequence of any bacterium was solved (Fleischmann et al., 1995), several years after that before a periodontal bacterium genome appeared (Nelson et al., 2003), and another 2 decades before the human genome (Lander et al., 2001) was unfurled with much fanfare across the World Wide Web—which itself was not even a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1980s. While there was a growing awareness of the power of microbial genetics and the techniques of molecular biology in periodontal research, these were still in their infancy. In those bygone days, the cloning and full sequencing of a bacterial gene was considered a very respectable project for a PhD thesis. In today’s reality, this is accomplished in the blink of an eye by a computer-driven search of the cornucopia of DNA sequence information held in publically available databases or, occasionally, by a trip to your local DNA sequencing facility where, for the cost of a few dollars, you can obtain your sequence information the next morning, allowing you to press on with the biological question that drove your enquiry in the first place. Have a nice day!