Researchers visualize antibiotic substances and their bacterial producers simultaneously
Microbes are the oldest and most successful organisms on the planet, and they communicate and interact using chemistry as their language. While research of the past decades has uncovered fascinating insights into the chemical interactions of microorganisms in the laboratory, it remains extremely challenging to understand what happens in the natural environment. One of the key issues is the difficulty to tie the production of particular molecules to individual bacterial cells or at least populations of cells in complex environmental samples. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific now made an important step into this direction by simultaneously visualizing the distribution of antibiotics and their producers in natural samples (The ISME Journal, July 2015).