The Incredible, Variable Bacteria Living in Your Mouth harvard.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from harvard.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It’s not a stretch to say that we live in a microbial world. Microbes can make us sick (as they are demonstrating right now), lead the way for medicines like targeted therapeutics and probiotics, and are crucial to almost every biological ecosystem. But there is much we don’t understand about them, so one group of researchers has taken a deeper look at one of the world’s most compact and dense bacterial hot spots: the human mouth.
In a study published last month in Genome Biology, a team of Harvard-led researchers used a recently developed technique combining state-of-the-art genetic sequencing and analysis to get an up-close look at the mouth and the ecosystem of microbial communities living within it, including those that cannot be cultured.
Researchers take a closer look at the genomes of microbial communities in the human mouth phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IMAGE: Micrograph showing Rothia cells (light blue) in their native habitat, a bacterial biofilm scraped from the human tongue. view more
Credit: Photo credit: Jessica Mark Welch, Marine Biological Laboratory.
Bacteria often show very strong biogeography - some bacteria are abundant in specific locations while absent from others - leading to major questions when applying microbiology to therapeutics or probiotics: how did the bacteria get into the wrong place? How do we add the right bacteria into the right place when the biogeography has gotten out of whack ?
These questions, though, have one big obstacle, bacteria are so tiny and numerous with very diverse and complicated populations which creates major challenges to understanding which subgroups of bacteria live where and what genes or metabolic abilities allow them to thrive in these wrong places.