Despite the substantial research advancements on oral diseases, dental caries remains a major healthcare burden. A disease of microbial dysbiosis, dental caries is characterised by the formation of biofilms that assist demineralisation and destruction of the dental hard tissues. While it is well understood that this is a multi-kingdom biofilm-mediated disease, it has been elucidated that acid producing and acid tolerant bacteria play pioneering roles in the process. Specifically, Streptococcus mutans houses major virulence pathways that enable it to thrive in the oral cavity and cause caries. This pathogen adheres to the tooth substrate, forms biofilms, resists external stress, produces acids, kills closely related species, and survives the acid as well as the host clearance mechanisms. For an organism to be able to confer such virulence, it requires a large and complex gene network which synergise to establish disease. In this review, we have charted how these multi-faceted genes control several caries-related functions of Streptococcus mutans. In a futuristic thinking approach, we also briefly discuss the potential roles of omics and machine learning, to ease the study of non-functional genes that may play a major role and enable the integration of experimental data.

尽管在口腔疾病方面有大量研究进展，但是龋齿仍然是主要的医疗保健负担。龋齿是一种微生物营养不良症，其特征是形成了有助于脱钙和破坏牙齿硬组织的生物膜。虽然众所周知这是一种多王国生物膜介导的疾病，但已阐明产酸和耐酸细菌在该过程中起着先锋作用。具体而言，变形链球菌具有主要的毒力通路，使其能够在口腔中壮成长并引起龋齿。该病原体粘附在牙齿基质上，形成生物膜，抵抗外部压力，产生酸，杀死密切相关的物种，并在酸和宿主清除机制下存活。为了使有机体能够赋予这种毒力，它需要一个庞大而复杂的基因网络，这些基因网络可以协同建立疾病。在这篇综述中，我们绘制了这些多方面的基因如何控制变形链球菌与龋齿相关的功能。在未来派思维方法中，我们还简要讨论了组学和机器学习的潜在作用，以简化对可能起主要作用的非功能基因的研究，并使实验数据得以整合。