Fig. 1

Overview of the multi-habitat and multi-resolution approach to compare microbial profiles. Adoptive and biological mother-child pairs were the main comparison groups. In addition, siblings and fathers in the biological group were recruited. Three distinct microbial habitats within the oral cavity were sampled–soft tissue and saliva, supragingival plaque, and subgingival plaque. For profiling species-level communities, amplicon sequencing targeting the 16S V1-V3 region was performed. For strain-level profiling, amplicon sequencing of the 16-23S Intergenic Spacer Region (ISR) was performed (see “Methods” section)