Cheese-based research
Go ahead, call Rachel Dutton’s research cheesy if you must. As far as she’s concerned, it’s anything but an insult. A Bauer Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Systems Biology, Dutton studies cheese — or more precisely, the bacteria and fungi that live on it — in an effort to better understand how microbial communities form. After studying 137 varieties of cheese collected in 10 countries, Dutton has identified three general types of microbial communities that live on cheese, opening the door to using each as a model for the study of whether and how various microbes and fungi compete or cooperate as they form communities, as well as what molecules and mechanisms are involved in the process. The study is described in a July 17 paper in the journal Cell. “We often use model organisms like E. coli or C. elegans because they can give us an understanding...