Dental Water Line
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Description of Niche
Where located?
Modern dentists utilize various apparatuses in treating patients in their offices. These apparatuses include but are not limited to: dental chair units, triple syringe system, high speed handpieces, ultra sonic scalers and etc. These dental units provide suitable conditions for dwelling for several forms of organisms including microbes and fungi. One common condition that these dental units possess in providing the organisms a suitable condition to live in is that these units are always in contact with water. In order for these dental instruments to work properly with water, water-lining are installed through out the clinic from the city-water output to the primary filtering system to each dental chair unit, which has the secondary filtering system. These units, however are left unused and their powers are off during the night, which aggravates the condition of the dental water line units ( or facilitates the growth of bacteria in these parts). edited by Bo R. Heo
Physical Conditions?
What are the conditions in your niche? Temperature, pressure, pH, moisture, etc.
Temperature: Temperatures vary from one dental unit to another in most cases and also from one dental office to another. However, according to most of the references, it indicates that the temperature of this niche fall under the range of 32 to 37 degrees Celcius.
Pressure:
Moisture:
There must be a constant flow of water since most dental unit waterlines require water.
pH:
The pH of this niche is neutral. There have been studies where researchers used acidic electrolyzed in dental fields to effectively disinfect the contamination at the microbial level of dental waterlines, and these studies showed that the water before it was washed with acidic electrolyzed solution had a pH of 7.
<<figure from Bactericidal Effects of Acidic Electrolyzed Water on the Dental Unit Waterline>>1
Influence by Adjacent Communities (if any)
Is your niche close to another niche or influenced by another community of organisms?
Many possibilities include: contamination or microbes getting transferred from one patient to dental units. When the patients are getting treated using the dental units, there is a possibility that dental units may collect the patient’s oral microbes and etc.
Another possibility may be the hands of dental staff since they deal with dental units and patients at the same time.
Conditions under which the environment changes
Do any of the physical conditions change? Are there chemicals, other organisms, nutrients, etc. that might change the community of your niche.
Who lives there?
Which microbes are present?
You may refer to organisms by genus or by genus and species, depending upon how detailed the your information might be. If there is already a microbewiki page describing that organism, make a link to it.
Are there any other non-microbes present?
Plants? Animals? Fungi? etc.
Do the microbes that are present interact with each other?
Describe any negative (competition) or positive (symbiosis) behavior
Do the microbes change their environment?
Do they alter pH, attach to surfaces, secrete anything, etc. etc.
Do the microbes carry out any metabolism that affects their environment?
Do they ferment sugars to produce acid, break down large molecules, fix nitrogen, etc. etc.
Current Research
Enter summaries of the most recent research. You may find it more appropriate to include this as a subsection under several of your other sections rather than separately here at the end. You should include at least FOUR topics of research and summarize each in terms of the question being asked, the results so far, and the topics for future study. (more will be expected from larger groups than from smaller groups)
References
(1)Bactericidal Effects of Acidic Electrolyzed Water on the Dental Unit Waterline. Shinya Kohno, Toshitsugu Kawata, et al. Jpn J Infect Dis VOL.57;NO.2;PAGE.52-54(2004)
(2)Kim, Eugene. D.D.S. has given certain comments about how the dental clinic is constructed and how the water lining is installed. (this will be put in MLA form later).
Edited by Jane Choi, Bo Ram Heo, Jinsoo Lee, Soh Yun Lee, and So Young Moon, students of Rachel Larsen
