Integrated oral microbiome profiling from aligners identifies biosynthetic signatures of disease
This study includes shotgun-metagenomic 860 samples from 371 individuals, including specimens from aligners, plaque, and saliva across healthy individuals and patients with caries or periodontitis. We found that clear aligners, worn continuously, provide a notably stable and comprehensive snapshot of oral microbial diversity, capturing 399 species and substantially overlapping with saliva. While only 25 species showed disease-associated differences, functional profiling revealed an extensive biosynthetic capacity, with 41,923 biosynthetic gene clusters organized into 1,786 families. Among these, 103 gene cluster families showed differential abundance in disease states and included both characterized antimicrobials and potentially novel metabolites.