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The microbial ecosystem nesting in your mouth is giving scientists a rare tool to learn about how bacteria multiply.

One of the most common bacteria living in your dental plaque, a filamentous bacterium called , divides not into two daughter cells like most cell divisions but multiple new microbes in a rarer process called multiple fission.

Led by microbiologist Scott Chimileski of the Marine Biological Laboratory in the US, a team of scientists observed single C. matruchotii cells dividing up into up to 14 new cells – a feat that can tell us how these organisms form the scaffolding that supports the hosts of other microbes that are dwelling in your mouth.

"Reefs have coral, forests have trees, and the dental plaque in our mouths has Corynebacterium," explains microbiologist Jessica Mark Welch of ADA Forsyth Institute and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

"The Corynebacterium cells in dental plaque are like a big, bushy tree in the forest; they create a spatial structure that provides the habitat for many other species of bacteria around them."

Most bacteria and archaea reproduce via an asexual process called . The genetic material divides, and the cell itself then divides, resulting in two organisms where there was one.