This Caterpillar-Like Organism May Be Crawling Around in Your Mouth Right Now



You are truly unique. You are a person with your own thoughts, emotions, and set of particular experiences.

Additionally, you're extremely warm and humid, making you an ambulatory habitat for countless tiny, microscopic bacteria. There are tiny organisms that are too small to see or feel crawling all over your skin, follicles, and internal organs.

It's fine, please keep quiet. This is for the best. In fact, there's a good chance that without them, you wouldn't be who you are. However, some of those tiny organisms are really peculiar, evolving and adapting to the special settings that the human body offers.

Scientists have discovered that one of those is a microbe that exists in your mouth. A recent study reveals that the Neisseriaceae family of bacteria, which contains genera with the shape of caterpillars and is present in nearly half of all humans, evolved this body shape because it is more adapted to the environment in the human mouth cavity.

This is pretty cool and teaches us important things about the biodiversity in your tongue.

It also has ramifications for the study of bacterial adaptation, which is crucial for learning, for instance, how to create more potent antibacterial treatments to get rid of illnesses in the body.

The team, co-led by cell biologist Silvia Bulgheresi of the University of Vienna in Austria and microbial geneticist Frédéric Veyrier of the French National Institute of Scientific Research, claims that their work "sheds light on the evolution of multicellularity and longitudinal division in bacteria" (INRS).

The morphological flexibility and genetic traceability of the Neisseriaceae family members "indicate that they may be ideal models to research these processes."

It's not exactly the friendliest habitat for germs to dwell in, despite the fact that your mouth might look like a very lovely area for them to do so. Your saliva makes things exceedingly slippery while the cells covering the inner surface of your mouth are regularly shed and replaced by new cells.

Since there are over 700 kinds of creepy creatures that live in the human mouth, this makes it harder for them to get traction. To be fair, though, it hasn't seemed to slow them down.

This, according to Bulgheresi, Veyrier, and their associates, may be the reason why some Neisseriaceae species have evolved a unique method of reproduction.

To begin, the researchers carefully examined the morphology of the bacteria using electron microscopy, while using fluorescence to comprehend cellular growth.

Then, they modified the genetic makeup of rod-shaped Neisseriaceae to see whether they could mimic the transition from a rod-shaped organism to the clusters that are observed writhing about in human mouths.

An image taken with a scanning electron microscope shows a group of Simonsiella muelleri. (Frédéric Veyrier and Sammy Nyongesa)

According to their investigation, the creatures did in fact descended from a rod-shaped ancestor.

As of right now, bacteria divide along their longitudinal axis, or body length.

Individual bacteria eventually stay connected to one another, creating a segmented cluster encased in a common outer membrane that resembles a bacterial version of the rolly-polly mascot, Bibendum, rather than dissolving.

Some of the microorganisms in this little group also change their forms, perhaps to play various, distinct tasks that are advantageous to the whole. This could serve as an illustration of how a single-celled organism changes into a multicellular one.

The researchers state in their report that multicellularity "makes cooperation between cells conceivable, for example, in the form of division of labor, and may thus allow bacteria to survive nutritional stress."

Because they were unable to introduce all the genetic events that lead to the current caterpillar-shaped form, the team was unable to duplicate the clustered shape of multicellular species like Conchiformibius steedae or Simonsiella muelleri. However, the technique did result in individual cells that were longer and thinner.

According to Veyrier, "We hypothesize that during evolution, through a reworking of the elongation and division processes, the cell shape changed, maybe to better thrive in the mouth cavity.

The researchers point out that in order to fully investigate the bacteria, genetic tools would be needed.

To better understand the mechanics underlying the symbiotic relationship that these tiny organisms have with their (relatively) enormous, mammalian hosts, evolutionary theory may be a useful adjunct to the study of these microscopic species and how they functio.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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