Home is where the tongue is Our mouths, as you might know, are awash in microbes. More than 700 species of bacteria live there, many of which are beneficial — happy microbial mouth ecosystems prevent bad breath. But you probably have never seen tongue germs this way. Researchers at the Forsyth Institute and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts scraped human tongues to collect bacterial film. (They tried a variety of tools, including "swabs, picks and scrapers," the scientists wrote in a study published this week in the journal Cell Reports; "a ridged plastic tongue scraper" worked best.) They stained the bacteria with fluorescent markers and examined how the microbes were oriented on the tongue. Some bacteria were freely speckled around. But many germs had a more orderly pattern (check out Fig. 3 in the paper), what the scientists called "organized consortia": regions dominated by certain bacterial types. Those same clusters appeared "on the tongue of every person we sampled," study author Jessica Mark Welch, who studies the ecology of microbes at the Marine Biological Laboratory, said in a statement. "We are looking at the mouth as a microbial landscape, where different bacterial communities occupy different kinds of habitats," she said. "The tongue is particularly important because it harbors a large reservoir of microbes and is a traditional reference point in medicine," Welch said. After all, as she pointed out: "'Stick out your tongue' is one of the first things a doctor says." | 
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