New oral features can be considered unique as a fingerprint

SOURCE: ASNANPORTAL.com As well as being one of the strongest muscles in the human body, the tongue has another interesting quality. Just like unique fingerprints, humans also possess a unique tongue print. Everyone has a unique tongue print, and while it may be some time before your local police station will start taking tongue and fingerprints, research on a 3-D imaging machine is being developed and tested. The tongue is a unique organ in that it can be stuck out of the mouth for inspection, and yet it is otherwise well protected in the mouth and is difficult to forge. The tongue also presents both geometric shape information and physiological texture information, which are potentially useful in identity verification applications. Another interesting fact is that each person's set of teeth is also unique — much like their fingerprints. Even identical twins do not have exactly the same set of teeth. However, the most powerful recent evidence which was published in the Oct 23, 2013, issue of the journal PLOS ONE was: "The bacteria in the human mouth — particularly those nestled under the gums — are as powerful as a fingerprint at identifying a person’s ethnicity." Scientists identified a total of almost 400 different species of microbes in the mouths of 100 study participants belonging to four ethnic affiliations: non-Hispanic blacks, whites, Chinese, and Latinos. Only 2% of bacterial species were present in all individuals — but in different concentrations according to ethnicity — and 8% were detected in 90% of the participants. Beyond that, researchers found that each ethnic group in the study was represented by a “signature” of shared microbial communities.Click here to read more clinical articles.Photo credit: Dreamstime.com