Microbial communities scraped from a human tongue. Each color represents a different genus. Cyan: Rothia, Red: Actinymyces, Yellow: Neisseria, Magenta: Veillonella, Green: Streptococcus, White: host epithelial materialSTEVEN WILBERT, GARY BORISY, FORSYTH INSTITUTE, CAMBRIDGE, MATypical microbiome studies take a sample of tissue, blend it up, and sequence the population’s genetic material to see which organisms are present. Such studies can inform scientists about what species reside at a particular body site, but not how their communities are organized in space. Gary Borisy’s lab at the Forsyth Institute is working to fill in that gap, mapping out microbial neighborhoods in various tissues.
In his latest endeavor, described Sunday (December 3) at the American Society for Cell Biology – EMBO meeting in Philadelphia, Borisy is exploring the surface of the tongue. His group has found that, unlike at other body sites—such as the plaque that lives along our gum lines or the mouse intestine—where bacterial taxa tend to intermingle, the genera of tongue bacteria form distinct clumps.
The researchers scraped the tongue surfaces of 20 human volunteers, then spread the material flat on slides for analyses. It’s not a perfect representation of the surface of the tongue, but more like if you scraped the carpet off a floor. It might fold up and deform somewhat, but the general position of the fibers (the microbes in this analogy) remains ...
