From bacterial traps to defective primary cilia to the rapid decline of female fertility, the attendees of the 2011 American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) meeting , held in Denver, Colorado from December 3 to 7, were buzzing with the cutting-edge research in cell biology. Here are some of the highlights of the meeting.
Illuminating the mouth microbiome
Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, unveiled a new fluorescent labeling technology last Tuesday (December 6) for visualizing in full color the microbial communities found in human dental plaque—a biofilm that develops naturally on teeth. The technology, called combinatorial labeling and spectral imaging (CLASI), overcomes the difficulty of simultaneously analyzing multiple fluorescent tags by using novel "unmixing" algorithms capable of processing more than 20 differentially labeled microbes in a single image. Already, CLASI has revealed that bacteria from the Prevotella and Actinomyces genera are keenest to interact with ...
