[Studies on artificial dental plaque. Preliminary observation on the morphology of developing artificial dental plaque].

This paper introduced a new method which was used to study the formation of dental plaque in vitro. From this investigation, it can be regarded that artificial dental plaque is similar to natural dental plaque in structure. In the 1st day, artificial dental plaque was mainly coccal shaped bacteria adherent on the tooth enamel. At the third day, the number of filaments and rods increased obviously, and in 5th and 7th day plaques, main bacteria were filaments, with a few rods and cocci, and the special palisade and corn cob structures were occurred. The morphology of 2-week, 3-week and 4-week plaque were almost the same, but denser in structure.