News
News Releases Prevention and management of oral diseases may get a boost
October 28, 2010—LANL scientists—Gary Xie, Patrick Chain, Chien-Chi Lo, and Kuan-Liang Liu of Genome Science/Joint Genome Institute (B-6) and Jason Gans of Biosecurity and Public Health (B-7)—along with collaborators from the University of Oklahoma have completed the first gene catalog of the community of microorganisms in human healthy dental plaque.
Their findings support the plaque hypothesis for oral diseases, which suggests that changes in the environment of an individual's mouth are the determining factors as to whether one gets periodontal disease. For example, a simple change in an individual's pH or a decrease in the amount of saliva could lead to a large alteration of the microbial composition of a plaque. The researchers obtained the first glimpse of the genomic contents of a community of microscopic organisms that live within human plaque.
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11,127 total employees
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Located 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 36 square miles of DOE-owned property.
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The Nobel Prize in Physics, Frederick Reines