Study finds we travel with our own germs

September 2, 2014  11:40

Sorry, clean freaks. No matter how well you scrub your home, it's covered in bacteria from your own body. And if you pack up and move, new research shows, you'll rapidly transfer your unique microbial fingerprint to the doorknobs, countertops and floors in your new house, too.

In fact, researchers who studied seven families in Illinois, Washington and California could easily match up who lived where using their microscopic roommates, almost like CSI for germs.

Thursday's study is part of an effort to understand how the trillions of mostly beneficial bacteria that live in and on our bodies - what's called the human microbiome - interact with bugs in the environment to affect our health.

"We have so little information about where the microbes come from that shape our microbiome, whether it's for health or disease," said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago.

For the study, Gilbert recruited seven households that included 15 adults, three children, three dogs and a cat. For six weeks, participants collected samples of the microscopic bugs living on and around them by swabbing the hands, feet, noses and paws of everyone in the household, plus doorknobs, light switches, floors and countertops.

Back in the laboratory, Gilbert's team identified the bugs by their DNA, and they reported Thursday in the journal Science that people substantially affect the microbial communities in their homes, FoxNews reports.

Different homes harbored markedly different bacterial populations, but they closely matched the microbiomes of their residents.

The big surprise: How quickly the bugs settled in. Like Pigpen's trailing cloud of dust in the Peanuts comic strip, when three families moved - one of them from a hotel room to a house - it took about a day for the microbes in their new homes to closely resemble those in the old ones.

"The speed at which that colonization happens was quite remarkable," Gilbert said.

Sure, there are some leftover bacteria from previous occupants, he said. But many bacteria die or go dormant after a while on a hard, air-conditioned surface. At the same time, the oil in your skin readily transfers your own bacteria to surfaces. That's not counting all those tiny flakes of dead skin that people constantly shed, microbe-filled dust that probably just blankets the bugs that were there first, Gilbert noted.

"It changed my perspective almost on hotel rooms," he added with a laugh.

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