According to a study, a sponge provides the ideal environment for germs to thrive.

According to new research, and everyday kitchen item is a better home for many different types of bacteria than a petri dish in a laboratory.

According to a study published recently in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, a common sponge's spatial partitioning — the way it's divided into different sectors of various sizes — caters to bacteria that prefer isolated environments and those that prefer to be around other organisms, making it the best of both worlds for microbial communities.

Bacteria that flourish in secluded places, such as the smaller pores of a sponge, will not "bully" other organisms for space, but microorganisms that rely on the presence of others will be able to survive thanks to the sponge's larger wells.

"It's like going to a party," said senior author Lingchong You, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. "There will be individuals who will enjoy having huge room interactions with a lot of people, and it will draw energy from that." "However, there are some people who prefer to be in a more intimate setting."

While the findings may help you understand why your kitchen sponge is a germ hotspot, the goal of this study, as you mentioned, is to find a way to design various microbial communities to produce substances of medical or biotechnological value.

Sweet Home, sweet home
Researchers looked at E. coli density and presence in two different approaches to come up with these findings. They employed plates with six to 1,536 independent wells with varying degrees of spatial segmentation. The plates revealed that the amount of space division has an effect on which bacteria flourish the best.

The researchers next tried a different experiment with a sponge and a tube. According to the findings, there are "60 percent more diverse individuals in a sponge than in a well-mixed environment," as you put it, referring to the compacted environment bacteria are in when placed within a tube.

You said, "The degree of this spatial partitioning plays a vital function in preserving microbial community diversity." "It's also possible that the ideal degree of partitioning is influenced by the nature of interactions in a specific bacterial community."
Overall, they discovered that environments with a mixture of large chambers and small wells support the most diverse microbial communities.

You advised users to be "mindful" of their sponges and change them regularly or find a technique to disinfect them because sponges are an "ideal development habitat for bacteria." According to a 2017 study published in the journal Scientific Reports, sponges should be replaced once a week. Microwave heating and dishwashing with a drying cycle are recommended by the US Department of Agriculture to sterilize microorganisms on sponges.

The results provide an understanding of the microbial point of view where "distances and spaces are dramatically different" from a human's point of view, said Slava Epstein, a professor of microbiology at Northeastern University, who was not involved with the study. By studying the distance between cells, which is measured in microns, researchers are better able to understand how the importance of scale impacts microbial interactions, Epstein said.