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This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

Aids cheeses like Camembera or Telegjo produce a powerful stench, the funk of cabbage, mushrooms, sulfur, even smelly feet.

And those aromas are chemicals that are being kicked off by the cheese, they're being emitted by the cheese,

and that's through the microbes that are living in the rind as they slowly decompose the

cheese.

Benjamin Wolf is a microbiologist at Tufts University.

He says, in addition to alerting our noses to the cheese,

the aromas produced by certain microbes living in and on the cheese

can feed and sculpt other members of the microbial garden living there.

Wolf and his colleagues identified some of those microbial interactions

by growing various cheese-dwelling fungi and bacteria

in separate but adjacent dishes in the lab.

The microbes couldn't touch, they could only interact via the volatile compounds they released.

And when we did this screen, this volatile screen, we quickly noticed that there was this one bacterium, a vibrio species that

really loved living in the aromas produced by the various fungi that you find in a typical wheel of camenbear.

Wolf says the vibrio bacteria may actually be able to eat the aromas,

which after all consists of chemical compounds,

and the odor of the cheese may also switch on

...