Menu

Skip to content
  • Home|
  • About|
  • Participate|
  • Social Directory|

The Well:

MBL News from the Source

You are here: Home / Getting the Microbe Story, Straight From the Mouth|Knowable Magazine

Getting the Microbe Story, Straight From the Mouth|Knowable Magazine

Published on November 1, 2019
Getting the Microbe Story, Straight From the Mouth|Knowable Magazine
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin

By Eryn Brown

If you’ve ever brushed your teeth or swished some mouthwash, they’ve been in your sight: the hundreds of billions of microorganisms — mostly bacteria — that live in the average human mouth. Dangling from the hard palate, burrowed in the nooks and crannies of the tongue and intertwined in the plaque on teeth are the many hundreds of species that make up the human oral microbiome.

For most, the bacteria in your mouth seem largely an inconvenience — critters all mixed together in a smelly goo, that must be flossed, brushed or rinsed away to keep your breath pleasant and gums healthily pink. But for Jessica Mark Welch of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Gary Borisy and Floyd Dewhirst of the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oral microbiome is a wonder. Far from a jumbled mess of cells, it’s a varied, ordered ecosystem that can reveal larger truths about the ways microbes interact with one another — and how their interactions impact the environments they inhabit. Read more…

Geneticist Jessica Mark Welch. Credit: James Provost

Source: Oral microbiome: Getting the microbe story, straight from the mouth|Knowable Magazine

Posted in MBL in the News | Tagged via bookmarklet

Post navigation

← Art Lab Panel Welcomes Renowned Artist Jan Dilenschneider Poet of the Sea, 1940s–1950s | The Scientist Magazine →

MBL in the News

  • Microbes are ‘Unknown Unknowns’ Despite Being Vital to all Life | The Guardian
  • Coral Reef Sprouting on Cape Cod | WBSM New Bedford
  • Model Organisms on Roads Less Traveled | Nature Methods
  • White House Appoints MBL Alumna Jane Lubchenco to Key Climate Science Position
  • REU Student at MBL is Third Author on Paper Receiving National Attention | Ripon Press
  • Octopuses, Like People, Seem To Have Active Stages Of Sleep, May Dream | NPR
  • What to Expect When You’re Expecting… A Signal from Space | CTV W5
  • U.S. Global Change Research Should Focus on Preparing for the Worst | National Academies
  • One of the World’s Most Venomous Animals Is a Snail | The Atlantic
  • Clever Cuttlefish Show Advanced Self-Control, Like Chimps and Crows | The Conversation
Archived Posts

Subscribe to the Well

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts.

Copyright © 2021 Marine Biological Laboratory