Dominance of Prevotella Species in Tobacco Consumers: A Metagenomic Preliminary Study

ABSTRACT: The human mouth cavity provides valuable clinical information about both oral and overall well-being. Tobacco has an impact on the oral microbiome, which is connected to a range of systemic disorders. Global studies are examining tobacco usage and other factors, including bacteria's role in oral cancer. Although there have been studies examining the connection between tobacco and the oral microbiota using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, there is a lack of investigations application of metagenomic sequences. we investigate, a total of 64 samples were obtained from each of the three categories: Tobacco chewers, Tobacco smokers and Normal healthy individuals. The samples were processed in duplicates. Total 10gbp data was generated with more than 90% good quality sequences and were used in downstream analysis. Metagenomic analysis was carried out using QIIME 2-2022.2 using the default parameters. An investigation was conducted to compare the prevalence of 18 species of Prevotella, which are found in high abundance in tobacco chewers (0.004%) as well as tobacco smokers (0.0017%) with compare to normal healthy persons (0.0008%). Total 15 species are absent in healthy individuals but present in tobacco consumers, while 30 species are found to be highly prevalent in tobacco chewers 12 species are highly abundant in tobacco smokers. Streptococcus was the most prevalent genus found among all the samples.