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ABSTRACT
Background
Bacteria respond to changes in their environment, such as nutrient depletion and antimicrobials exposure. Antimicrobials result not only in bacterial death, but also have a hand in determining species abundances and ecology of the oral biofilms. Proximity of dead bacterial cells to living ones is an important environmental change or stress factor. Dead bacteria represent high concentrations of nutrients, such as proteins, lipids, sugars, and nucleic acids. Living bacteria can use these biomasses as a nutrients source, which is termed necrotrophy.
Aim
This study investigates the effect of exposing living oral bacteria (planktonic and biofilms) to their dead siblings after being killed by heat or hydrogen peroxide.
Results
Tested bacterial species showed different responses towards the dead cells, depending on the mode of killing, the nutritional value of the culture media, and the the dead cells density. The multispecies oral biofilms showed different responses towards the supplementation of dead cells during biofilm development, while matured biofilms were more resilient.
Conclusion
This study indicates that dead bacteria resulting from antiseptics use may imbalance the nutrient availability in the oral cavity, resulting in overgrowth of opportunistic species, and hence ecological changes in oral communities, or introducing new bacterial phenotypes.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge Mrs. Martine Pauwels (laboratory of oral biology, KU Leuven) for the help with the v-qPCR, and Eng. Fabian Mermans (Center for Microbial Ecology and Technology, UGent) for helping with the COD measurements.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Author contributions
Mrs. Zayed designed and carried out the experiments, contributed to data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation, wrote, and critically revised the manuscript; Mr. Van Holm contributed to design, and revised the manuscript; Prof. Kristel Bernaerts contributed to the data analysis, and critically revised the manuscript; prof. Wim Teughels and Prof. Boon contributed to experiment conception and design, data analysis and interpretation, and critically revised the manuscript.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20002297.2023.2184930