By Marcus Woo

… Over the past few years, thanks to advances in imaging technology, researchers have gotten the first glimpse of where exactly individual microbes live. They are taking snapshots of entire microbiomes—inside the mouth, for example—with detail down to the single-cell level, revealing communities that arrange themselves with remarkable order. “In the oral microbiome, we’re finding an astonishing amount of spatial structure,” says Jessica Mark-Welch, a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA. “These bacterial communities are much more highly organized than we had anticipated.”

Precise microbiome mapping is still a new area of research, but such snapshots are already empowering researchers to ask and answer new questions about how microbes interact and work together, not just to better understand the microbial universe, but potentially to improve human health and the environment. Read more …