UChicago Research Roundup | UChicago Magazine

Dental plaque—the thin film on your teeth where they meet your gums—is composed of hundreds of types of bacteria. One of the most prevalent, Corynebacterium matruchotii (it’s a mouthful), functions as scaffolding for other bacteria in the oral microbiome. Until recently, the process by which C. matruchotii grow and reproduce eluded scientists. To make the bacterium easier to study, researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory dyed the organism with fluorescent amino acids and recorded a time-lapse video of its growth. They discovered that C. matruchotii is able to split into up to 14 new cells at once, in a kind of reproduction known as multiple fission. This division strategy is rare in the broader bacterial kingdom, where the vast majority of bacteria split into only two new cells. Read the rest of the article here.

Source: UChicago Research Roundup | UChicago Magazine