| Summary: | Oral health is maintained by a healthy microbiome, which can be monitored by state-of-the art diagnostics. Therefore, this study evaluated the presence and quantity of ten oral disease-associated taxa (<i>P. gingivalis</i>, <i>T. forsythia</i>, <i>T. denticola</i>, <i>F. nucleatum, C. rectus</i>, <i>P. intermedia</i>, <i>A. actinomycetemcomitans</i>, <i>S. mutans</i>, <i>S. sobrinus</i>, oral associated <i>Lactobacilli</i>) in saliva and their clinical status association in 214 individuals. Upon clinical examination, study subjects were grouped into healthy, caries and periodontitis and their saliva was collected. A highly specific point-of-care compatible dual color qPCR assay was developed and used to study the above-mentioned bacteria of interest in the collected saliva. Assay performance was compared to a commercially available microbial reference test. Eight out of ten taxa that were investigated during this study were strong discriminators between the periodontitis and healthy groups: <i>C. rectus</i>, <i>T. forsythia</i>, <i>P. gingivalis</i>, <i>S. mutans, F. nucleatum</i>, <i>T. denticola</i>, <i>P. intermedia</i> and oral <i>Lactobacilli</i> (<i>p</i> < 0.05). Significant differentiation between the periodontitis and caries group microbiome was only shown for <i>S. mutans</i> (<i>p</i> < 0.05). A clear distinction between oral health and disease was enabled by the analysis of quantitative qPCR data of target taxa levels in saliva.
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