Researchers are studying unfamiliar forms of bacteria. The best place to find them? It’s inside our mouths.
A whole world of bacteria sits inside a petri dish. Though it isn't always pleasant to think about, billions of mysterious microbes dwell inside our mouths, too. .microorganisms that scientists are just starting to discover. But doing so hasn't been a walk in the microbial park.
"It is a significant proportion of all the bacteria out there," Mougous says of these Patescibacteria, but "we don’t know what their genes encode.", Mougous and his colleagues introduced a new strategy for isolating and propagating these microbes in the lab. Their strategy allowed the team to identify and genetically manipulate mouth-dwelling Patescibacteria in such a way that they gained a sense of what the microbes' different genes actually do.
Though there's still a lot that they don’t know, Mougous says that future researchers can build on his team's baseline, applying the findings to the fields of human health and therapy. “Here’s this big untapped treasure chest of DNA that is very divergent from other DNA that we haven’t been able to look at,” Mougous says.Understanding these microbes is important for other areas of human health, too. As parasites, Patescibacteria perform an ecological function, regulating the microbiomes in which they live. They may act as population control, for instance, limiting the spread of harmful or benevolent bacteria.
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