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Population-based epidemiologic studies can provide important insight regarding the role of the microbiome in human health and disease. Buccal cells samples using commercial mouthwash have been obtained in large prospective cohorts for the purpose of studying human genomic DNA. We aimed to better understand if these mouthwash samples are also a valid resource for the study of the oral microbiome. We collected one saliva sample and one Scope mouthwash sample from 10 healthy subjects. Bacterial 16S rRNA genes from both types of samples were amplified, sequenced, and assigned to bacterial taxa. We comprehensively compared these paired samples for bacterial community composition and individual taxonomic abundance. We found that mouthwash samples yielded similar amount of bacterial DNA as saliva samples (p from Student’s t-test for paired samples = 0.92). Additionally, the paired samples had similar within sample diversity (p from = 0.33 for richness, and p = 0.51 for Shannon index), and clustered as pairs for diversity when analyzed by unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis. No significant difference was found in the paired samples with respect to the taxonomic abundance of major bacterial phyla, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Fusobacteria, and Actinobacteria (FDR adjusted q values from Wilcoxin signed-rank test = 0.15, 0.15, 0.87, 1.00 and 0.15, respectively), and all identified genera, including genus Streptococcus (q = 0.21), Prevotella (q = 0.25), Neisseria (q = 0.37), Veillonella (q = 0.73), Fusobacterium (q = 0.19), and Porphyromonas (q = 0.60). These results show that mouthwash samples perform similarly to saliva samples for analysis of the oral microbiome. Mouthwash samples collected originally for analysis of human DNA are also a resource suitable for human microbiome research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]