Evaluation of microbiota in zirconia implants
This study aimed to evaluate the oral microbiome around zirconia implants inserted in fibula free and deep circumflex iliac artery (DCIA) flaps in comparison to the natural teeth. Zirconia implants were used to treat ten patients who received vascularized bone flaps used for jaw reconstruction (six fibula and four DCIA flaps). Peri-implant microbiota samples around zirconia implants compared to natural teeth were taken immediately after implant surgery, after three and 12 months. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing was performed at Eurofins Genomics (Konstanz, Germany) with standard genomic library preparation, including unique dual indexing and Illumina paired-end sequencing (Novaseq 6000). The paired-end reads were quality-filtered and trimmed using Trimmomatic (v. 0.39) to remove adapter sequences and low-quality bases. Human host DNA was then removed following best practices by aligning the reads against the hg19 reference human genome using Bowtie 2, retaining only read pairs that did not align concordantly.