When I meet someone I can tell where they’re from right away.
I don’t even need to hear their accent, just 3 minutes alone in their office with
some q-tips.
Hello ladies and germs, Trace here for DNews.
Microbes.
Those little guys are everywhere: cell phones, door knobs, eating utensils.
If you have to touch it, it’s got bacteria on it.
You have 10 times more bacteria cells in/on your body than your own actual human cells,
and they make up 1 to 3% of your weight.
Everywhere you look there are so many microbes that they form little communities called microbiomes,
and those microbiomes will vary a lot from place to place, even just within your own
body.
And scientists are just beginning to understand them.
Strangely enough, while the microbiomes populating the short span from your butt to your face
are all really different, thankfully, the ones in your office are surprisingly similar
to what you’d find in any office across town.
That’s according to a new study published in the American Society for Microbiology’s
journal mSystems.
The study examined the bacterial diversity in 9 offices in San Diego, Toronto, and Flagstaff,
Arizona.
Researchers placed sterilized plates on the floor, wall, and ceiling of each office and
controlled for materials by having carpet, drywall, and ceiling tile on each plate.
Over the course of a year, they would come in, swab the plates with cotton and analyze
the DNA sequences present.
Firstly, some of your instincts are correct.
Yes, the floor of your work is a seething cauldron of biodiversity.
No matter the city, the season, or the material, the floor always had the highest variety of
microbes.
So if you’re going to drop your food, try and get it on the wall instead of the carpet.
Secondly, it turns out microbiomes inside built environments within a single city are
surprisingly uniform.
So much so, that the researchers could guess where unlabeled samples came from with 85%
accuracy.
There were similarities across all cities: Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria
were the 3 dominant phyla everywhere, but each cities exact composition was so precise
it was like a bacterial fingerprint.
Researchers asked office workers not to touch the experiment, so the humans in the office
didn’t have as much impact on the samples as they otherwise might have… but we still
got our grossness on everything.
Sure, each office has that one weird guy that we all know isn’t washing his hands…
Kevin.
But even without the Kevins of the world rubbing their grubby mitts on the experiment, humans
had a moderate impact on the results: 25 to 30% of the microbes detected are associated
with humans, particularly those from human skin.
Yum.
The researchers called this a landmark paper, because they controlled for some of the assumptions
we made about indoor and outdoor spaces.
Humans are all sort of like Pig Pens, but instead of dirt swirling around us, we each
carry our own micro-organistic solar system…
so to speak.
Now scientists need to learn how to create buildings and spaces that better reflect the
natural microbiota of the surrounding region!
For example, what's the microbiome of somewhere FILLED with Kevins: a New York City subway
station!
A 2013 Weill Cornell Medical College research project called PathoMap attempted to find
out if the bacteria differ from one stop to the next!
Undergrads set to work on 466 of the city's stations, swabbing turnstiles, railings, and
the insides of cars with q-tips for 3 minutes at a time.
I'm sure no one noticed, because… you know, anything can happen on the Subway.
Their DNA sequences revealed the biodiversity was significantly different from one borough
to the next!
The Bronx had the widest variety of species, while Staten Island was the most vanilla.
Bacteria specialized for human skin were the most common, with a close second being bacteria
from the business end of the gastrointestinal tract…
You know what I’m talking about.
Though the researchers noted they didn’t find as much fecal bacteria as they expected.
Hooray for New York?
The project has since gone worldwide under the name MetaSUB, so people from Beijing to
Barcelona can learn just how much gastrointestinal bacteria they’re sharing the ride with.
I know all this talk of the world being covered in bacteria may make some of you squirm, but
usually those little guys are helping you out.
Then again sometimes they’re not, but there is one dead giveaway when your gut bacteria
are out of order.
Julian covers it here.