How Many Microbial Species Are in One Person's Mouth?

On Simulation, Dr. Patrick Schwientek and Dr. Kishore Nannapaneni of Oralta say a single person's mouth holds on average only about 700 microbial species, while the oral microbiome as a whole runs to a few thousand. They contrast that with the rhizosphere, the soil around plant roots, where more than a thousand species are known and the community is more complex than the mouth. They had been building algorithms for that plant community and decided the mouth was the harder-to-help, simpler place to move them. The personal version: Patrick says he gets plaque and cavities, and Kishore has the sort of balanced mouth that does not.