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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the ACH-OOOOOOOOOOOOOO dept.

For the past four years, Dunn and two of his colleagues—Noah Fierer, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Holly Menninger, the director of public science at N.C. State—have been deciphering these histories, investigating the microorganisms in our dust and how their lives are intertwined with our own.

The scientists began with a small pilot study, recruiting forty families in the Raleigh-Durham area to swab nine locations in their homes. When the researchers analyzed these cotton swabs and sequenced the fragments of bacterial DNA that they contained, they found that even the most sparkling houses were teeming with microbial squatters—more than two thousand distinct types, on average. Different rooms formed distinct ecological niches: kitchens were popular among the bacteria that grow on produce, whereas bedroom and bathroom surfaces were colonized by those that typically dwell on the skin. (In a troubling discovery, Dunn and his colleagues learned that, from a microbiological perspective, toilet seats and pillowcases look strikingly similar.)

The fungi in the dust of your house tell where you live, the bacteria tell who lives there.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:41PM (#261734)

    Not so fast there Sherlock. If you live or was raised in a sterile environment, you don't build up immunities and will be more susceptible to allergies and sickness in your lifetime.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:25PM (#261826)

    If you think an environment gets sterile by removing the dust, think again.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:12PM (#261900)

      LMGTFY... Dust consists of particles in the atmosphere that come from various sources such as soil, dust lifted by weather (an aeolian process), volcanic eruptions, and pollution. Dust in homes, offices, and other human environments contains small amounts of plant pollen, human and animal hairs, textile fibers, paper fibers, minerals from outdoor soil, human skin cells, burnt meteorite particles, and many other materials which may be found in the local environment... House dust mites are present indoors wherever humans live. Positive tests for dust mite allergies are extremely common among people with asthma.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by juggs on Thursday November 12 2015, @03:47AM

    by juggs (63) on Thursday November 12 2015, @03:47AM (#262031) Journal

    Anecdotal of course... IME the young kids of parents who hermetically seal their offspring by bleaching every surface everyday and chastising ever picking anything off the floor to put it into their mouth are the ones that perpetually have horrific looking green and yellow mucus running from their noses. Which of course inspires said parents to be ever more bleachy.

    Seems particularly to be a problem in such families living in older properties, built in the days of open fireplaces which have since been modernised, fireplaces now closed up and windows replaced with unvented UPVC double glazed units. So no ventilation.

    I'm not suggesting anyone run around with needles covered in plague or ebola jabbing them into young kids, but common sense (and education) should surely prevail here... let the kid play in the garden, get a bit muddy, the odd cut or two as they explore, socialise with other muddy kids, get stung by a bee when they whack it to see what happens etc. They learn and more importantly their immune system learns.

    Not so easy in a high density urban setting where the back yard is 10' by 10' and full of cat and dog poop of course, there would be other risks there - but that's another matter (too may domestic pets by area).

    Human immune systems have not yet evolved to exist in hermetically sealed sterile boxes for their formative years to then be set loose in the reality of the "unhygienic" world outside that box. Kinda forseeable car crash really.