16 s rRNAseq
STERILE, CAVITY
The murine oral cavity was swabbed for 30 s, using sterile fine tip rayon swabs (VWR International) after the animal was culled, and the swabs were stored in 100 µl reduced John’s transport medium at -70 °C. Whole genomic DNA was extracted from the above swabs using the DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit (Qiagen) according to manufacturer’s instructions. PCR reactions targeting the V1-V2 variable regions of the 16S rRNA gene were performed as previously described in Joseph et al. [The generated reads were quality checked, filtered, trimmed, denoised, dereplicated and assembled into amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) using the DADA2 v1.16 pipeline [