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Bits of Brie are scattered about on petri dishes in Rachel Dutton’s microbiology lab at the University of California, San Diego. The distinctive smells they give off come from the cheeses’ rinds—specifically, the multitude of microbes blooming on the crumbly or waxy surface of the creamy curd.
“The cheese rind microbiome lets us study microbiomes in general,” Manon Morin, a postdoc in Dutton’s lab, tells The Scientist. “We can grow each member of the cheese rind microbiome in the lab individually and then recombine them one by one to study their interactions. We can essentially construct and deconstruct the cheese rind microbiome.”
Microbial communities exist just about everywhere on Earth, from our skin and our gut to the soil and the ocean, and play an integral role in human health and disease. Yet scientists have struggled to cultivate many of Earth’s microorganisms in the lab. Cheese, by ...
