Scary time-lapse video on the page.
The microbial ecosystem nesting in your mouth is giving scientists a rare tool to learn about how bacteria multiply.
One of the most common bacteria living in your dental plaque, a filamentous bacterium called Corynebacterium matruchotii, divides not into two daughter cells like most cell divisions but multiple new microbes in a rarer process called multiple fission.
….To observe how these structures add new filaments, the researchers used time-lapse microscopy, observing in real-time how the bacteria within the microbiome interact with each other, coexist, propagate, and grow.
This is where they saw the unusual cell division of C. matruchotii was not the normal binary kind, but much more prolific. And it does so in a very strange way.
First, the filament elongates at just one end, growing much longer than the usual size of the cell. It does so at a rate five times faster than other, closely related Corynebacterium species that live in the nose or on the skin.
Then, a number of dividing walls called septa form simultaneously, before the cell breaks apart into between 3 and 14 complete daughter cells.
Thanks to this strange process, a colony of C. matruchotii can grow very fast indeed, up to half a millimeter per day – which might help explain why plaque starts to return to your teeth within hours, no matter how strenuously you clean them.
“These biofilms are like microscopic rainforests. The bacteria in these biofilms interact as they grow and divide. We think that the unusual C. matruchotii cell cycle enables this species to form these very dense networks at the core of the biofilm,” Chimileski says.
