From: judgebean23x@gmail.com   
      
   Do Gut Microbes Travel From Person to Person?   
   By Veronique Greenwood | May 1, 2012 11:04 am   
      
   It’s an exciting time for ecologists who study microbes. DNA sequencing has   
   grown so cheap and fast that they can run around identifying bacteria living   
   just about anywhere they can reach with a cotton swab. Turns out, bacteria are   
   everywhere, even in    
   the cleanest houses, and scientists are starting to wonder: do those bacteria   
   in the home reflect the bacteria that live inside the inhabitants?   
      
   And if so, can they travel from person to person?   
      
   A small insight into this question came at one of the presentations at the   
   International Human Microbiome Congress (covered by New Scientist in a short   
   piece here). James Scott, who studies molecular genetics at the University of   
   Toronto, reported that    
   the gut microbes of babies, as found in their poop, were also in the dust in   
   the babies’ homes. It’s not clear whether this means that bacteria in the   
   dust are colonizing the babies or vice versa—or both—but it’s still   
   something of a surprise.    
   Gut microbes don’t seem like the sort to thrive outside the body, as they   
   tend to require an oxygen-free environment. But maybe the gut bacteria in the   
   dust are in a dormant form, waiting to be absorbed into a new gut before   
   flowering into life again.   
      
   The corollary of this finding is that perhaps the other inhabitants of that   
   home might pick up those microbes. Your gut microbiome, thus, would be closer   
   to your roommates’ than to a stranger’s, something that would be easy to   
   test with modern    
   sequencing techniques. There’s also room to speculate that as we learn more   
   about the microbiome’s relationship to disease, the swapping of microbes   
   within a household could reveal an infectious component to illnesses that we   
   don’t currently think    
   of that way. It’s just a speculation now, but an interesting one.   
      
   A whole rash of projects like Scott’s baby study, most yet unpublished, are   
   starting to give scientists a sense of the interplay between our personal   
   microbiomes and those of our homes. Many of these projects require the help of   
   generous citizens like    
   yourselves who submit samples from their homes for analysis, in fact: Here are   
   a couple to start with, if you’re curious.   
      
   Before you know it, you’ll be swabbing everything in sight—just like the   
   pros.   
      
   Image courtesy of juhan sonin / flickr   
      
      
      
   http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/05/01/do-gut-micr   
   bes-travel-from-person-to-person/#.V5mh3HpOnqC   
      
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