Here’s where bacteria live on your tongue cells
Myriad microbes dwell on human tongues — and scientists have now gotten a glimpse at the neighborhoods that bacteria build for themselves. Bacteria grow in thick films, with different types of microbes clustered in patches around individual cells on the tongue’s surface, researchers report online March 24 in Cell Reports. This pattern suggests individual bacterial cells first attach to the tongue cell’s surface and then grow in layers as they form larger clusters — creating miniature environments the different species need to thrive. “It’s amazing, the complexity of the community that they build right there on your tongue,” says Jessica Mark Welch, a microbiologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Methods to identify microbial communities typically hunt for genetic fingerprints from various types of bacteria (SN: 11/05/09). The techniques can reveal what lives on the tongue, but not how the bacterial community is organized in space, Mark Welch says. So she and her colleagues had people scrape the top of...