"Maintaining this uniqueness requires maintaining the uniqueness of the microbial communities," says Cavalieri, who comes from a long line of vintners.
We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community," said Ortiz, the first author of the study.
"People are realizing that you have this rich bacterial community living on the surface of your teeth, and if your gums are bleeding you have an open vascular network right next door to a microbial community," said Collins.
"If it's true that production of this acid leads to cancer, there could be ways to inhibit the production by manipulating diet or fine-tuning people's microbial communities," Turnbaugh says.
"I'm interested in taking this evolutionary viewpoint and looking at whether there might be a reason, evolutionarily speaking, that humans have a distinct gut microbial community," Amato says.
"I like their approach" of building a tree based on comparing the makeup of microbial communities in different animals' guts, says microbiologist and infectious disease specialist David Relman of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Found in pills, powders and fermented foods such as yogurt and kefir, probiotics are often said to help balance our internal microbial communities, or microbiome, by providing an infusion of health-promoting bugs that support the body's optimal functioning.
Studying cheese rinds could provide insight into other microbial communities, such as those found on skin, the authors say.
One outcome, he said, would to determine how our gut microbial communities are causally related to health and disease risk.
Angenent said that where the genome surveys of these microbial communities could lead is particularly exciting.
