Advances in the diversity of nasopharyngeal microbial communities

Abstract:

The microbial flora located in human nasopharynx keeps a dynamic balance with the human body. It plays an important role in maintaining the human health, and related with various upper respiratory tract diseases. The relationship within nasopharynx microbes, and between microbes and host, is the key cause of human upper respiratory tract diseases. The development of culture-dependent and-independent molecular methods in microbial communities research provide a useful tool to learn more about the composition and structure of human nasopharyngeal microbial communities. It demonstrated that the dominant floras located in human nasopharynx were Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, which were considered as potential pathogens in nasopharynx. In this work, the development in nasopharyngeal microbial community research was reviewed in the following three aspects: the balance between nasopharyngeal microbe and the human body; method in nasopharyngeal microbial community research; and the composition of nasopharyngeal microbial community and the internal relationship among them. This review summarized the progress on this field for the reference of the future work.