The Surprising Structural Reason Your Kitchen Sponge is Disgusting
upstart writes:
The surprising structural reason your kitchen sponge is disgusting:
In a series of experiments, the scientists show how various microbial species can affect one another's population dynamics depending on factors of their structural environment such as complexity and size. Some bacteria thrive in a diverse community while others prefer a solitary existence. And a physical environment that allows both kinds to live their best lives leads to the strongest levels of biodiversity.
Soil provides this sort of optimal mixed-housing environment, and so does your kitchen sponge.
[...] The results, You says, create a framework for researchers working with diverse bacterial communities to begin testing what structural environments might work best for their pursuits. They also point toward why a kitchen sponge is such a useful habitat for microbes. It mimics the different degrees of separation found in healthy soil, providing different layers of separation combined with different sizes of communal spaces.
[...] To prove this point, the researchers also ran their experiment with a strip of regular household sponge. The results showed that it's an even better incubator of microbial diversity than any of the laboratory equipment they tested.
"As it turns out, a sponge is a very simple way to implement multilevel portioning to enhance the overall microbial community," You said. "Maybe that's why it's a really dirty thing -- the structure of a sponge just makes a perfect home for microbes."
Journal Reference:
Wu, Feilun, Ha, Yuanchi, Weiss, Andrea, et al. Modulation of microbial community dynamics by spatial partitioning, Nature Chemical Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s41589-021-00961-w)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.