The gunk on your teeth is beautiful and well organized

(credit: Jessica Mark Welch, MBL Woods Hole)

Are you ready for a close-up—a really, really close close-up? The microbes in your mouth probably are and, boy, are they looking fabulous.

Using genetic and fluorescent probes, researchers lit up the ornate structures of microbes that glom onto human teeth. The resulting images and analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that mouth-dwelling microbes don’t just amass in haphazard globs on the outside of unclean teeth. Instead, the microbes build consistent structures that organize inhabitants into areas where they perform specific functions. The unexpected finding suggests that teeth tenants set up highly ordered and collaborative ecosystems on human choppers.

Those structured ecosystems expose “unanticipated interactions and provides a framework for understanding the organization, metabolism, and systems biology of the microbiome and ultimately, its effect on the health of the human host,” the authors of the study report.