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Bacterial species singled out from a diverse crowd

Microscopy methods that reveal the spatial patterns of individual types of microbe are limited by the number of different species that can be monitored together. A new technique now provides progress on this front.
  1. Jen Nguyen

    1. Jen Nguyen is at the School of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T-1Z3, Canada.

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  2. Carolina Tropini

    1. Carolina Tropini is at the School of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T-1Z3, Canada, and at the Humans and the Microbiome Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada.

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Understanding an ecosystem requires maps of where the organisms present live and act. For example, sea otters reside on the surface of kelp beds and feed on sea urchins that consume kelp from the ocean floor. An organism’s location in an ecosystem reflects its physiology and function. This is particularly true for microbes, which live in and respond to highly dynamic and diverse habitats. Micrometre-scale gradients of nutrients or pH, for instance, are a typical feature of microbial habitats that drive bacterial spatial organization and behaviour1,2. Yet, despite the incredible range of functions that different bacteria perform independently and in association with other living systems3,4, most microbes are similar in shape and indistinguishable under the microscope. Writing in Nature, Shi et al.5 present a method to tackle the major challenge of differentiating between the hundreds to thousands of bacterial species found in microbes’ natural habitats.

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Nature 588, 591-592 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03315-z

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