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   US Edition    
   Newsweek    
      
   Your Microbiome Extends in a Microbial Cloud Around You, Like an Aura    
   BY ZOË SCHLANGER 9/22/15 AT 9:35 AM    
   man-enveloped-in-cloud TECH & SCIENCE    
      
      
      
   New research shows that all humans have a microbial cloud that emanates from   
   their bodies. Though it's invisible to the eye, scientists can sample and   
   sequence the cloud to identify your unique airborne microbial signature.   
   CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS    
   FILED UNDER: Tech & Science, Environmental Health, Communicable diseases    
   Your skin is teeming with microbes. Millions of them. From the perspective of   
   these tiny organisms, the surface of your body is their living, breathing   
   habitat. This living layer is part of what's called the human microbiome--the   
   collective genomes of    
   all the "foreign" microorganisms that live in the human body--and research on   
   it has exploded in recent years. But within microbiome research is a brand-new   
   field that is just beginning to understand a stunning fact: Your microbiome   
   extends beyond    
   yourself, into the air around you. It hovers in a cloud around your body and   
   leaves bits of itself on surfaces wherever you go. In short, you have an aura,   
   except it isn't made of purplish light; it's your personal cloud of dead skin   
   cells, fungus and    
   many, many microbes. And researchers are learning to be able to identify you   
   by it.    
      
   "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like   
   that," says James Meadow, a data scientist at Phylagen, a company in San   
   Francisco that focuses on improving the health of the indoor microbiome in   
   places like hospitals and    
   homes. (All sorts of people, places and things can have their own   
   microbiomes.) "We give off a million biological particles from our body every   
   hour as we move around. I have a beard; when I scratch it, I'm releasing a   
   little plume into the air. It's    
   just this cloud of particles we're always giving off, that happens to be   
   nearly invisible."    
      
   Related: Distinctive Microbiome Associated With Schizophrenia    
      
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   On Tuesday, Meadow and his colleagues published a paper written while he was a   
   postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon. In it, he and his   
   research partners sampled the air surrounding 11 different people in a   
   sanitized experimental room and    
   sequenced the microbes emanating from them. They determined that an occupied   
   room is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one. What's more, after three   
   people spent four hours in a room together, giving off their microbes into the   
   air and onto    
   surfaces, Meadow's team was able to distinguish each person based just on the   
   bacteria in the surrounding air. "Each occupant's personalized airborne signal   
   can be statistically differentiated from other occupants," they wrote.    
      
   "This was a first stab at it to see if it was possible. We didn't expect to be   
   able to tell people apart," Meadow says. "It kind of blew us away."    
      
   Among other differences between people's microbial cloud "signatures," one   
   that stood out was their gender. The researchers were able to identify when a   
   woman was in the chamber because the microbes in the air around her included   
   Lactobacillus, a type of    
   bacteria that is typically found in abundance in the environment in a woman's   
   vagina.    
      
      
    Microbial Cloud    
   IMAGE CREATED BY VIPUTHESHWAR SITARAMAN, OF DRAW SCIENCE    
      
   In large part, you can thank your body heat for generating your unique   
   microbial cloud. Heat rises off the body, propelling the particles outward.   
   Your breath, which is part of your microbiome, is also hot and can push   
   particles out too. The size of your    
   cloud will have to do, in part, with how hot or cold your body temperature is   
   at the moment.    
      
   You're 100 Percent Wrong About Showering    
      
      
   How far the cloud reaches is all dependent on the "viscosity of the air,"   
   according to Meadow. "We can only feel air when it's hitting us. But for   
   something that tiny [a microbe], air is more like water. If there's any little   
   bit of movement, they can    
   just float around the room indefinitely. The tiniest bacteria can be picked up   
   and stay in the air for hours," he says. "Even just sitting at your desk, your   
   cloud is probably reaching to your neighbor."    
      
   Understanding the interplay between the microbial cloud and environment could   
   form the basis for attempts to better engineer indoor spaces to prevent the   
   transmission of diseases. "We could potentially design our buildings around   
   that. If we know there's    
   an airborne disease risk, maybe we could develop ventilation accordingly,"   
   says Meadow. Places like hospitals or offices could stand to benefit, for   
   example.      
      
   Another potential real-world application for microbial cloud research is   
   forensics. We already know, for example, how to distinguish between the   
   bacterial fingerprints people leave on their computer keyboards. And while it   
   may be "years down the road,"    
   Meadow says, our ability to distinguish between people based on their airborne   
   microbial signatures will likely get better and better. "I can think of all   
   kinds of reasons why we'd want to know if a nefarious character had been   
   hanging around a room."    
   Plus, researchers already know that the skin microbiome differs according to   
   where a person lives, so chances are good their microbial cloud does too. "It   
   might be able to tell us where they've been."    
      
   Dr. Martin Blaser, who was not involved in the study, agrees. Blaser is the   
   director of NYU's Human Microbiome Program and considered one of the foremost   
   experts in the field. "Just like the detectives today are dusting a room to   
   look for fingerprints,    
   maybe [in the future] they'll take a big vacuum and see what microbes are   
   there. It's certainly not tomorrow, but it might be possible."    
      
   Blaser also wonders what the future implications might be for privacy. "I   
   think it's just like people looking at your electronic data. But there may be   
   a more concrete microbial signature. Privacy potentially could be breached in   
   many realms. We're very    
   concerned about electronic privacy, but we have [other] signatures [too]."    
      
   Related: L'Oréal to Start Printing 3-D Skin With Bioengineering Company    
      
   Still, there are many more basic unanswered questions. For example, Blaser   
   says, researchers still don't know whether taking antibiotics would totally   
   rearrange a person's microbial cloud, to the point of not being able to   
   distinguish them.    
      
      
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