Couples
who live together share many things: Bedrooms, bathrooms, food, and even
bacteria. After analyzing skin microbiomes from cohabitating couples, microbial
ecologists found that people who live together significantly influence the
microbial communities on each other's skin.
The
commonalities were strong enough that computer algorithms could identify
cohabitating couples with 86 percent accuracy based on skin microbiomes alone,
the researchers report this week in mSystems, an open-access journal of the
American Society for Microbiology.
However,
the researchers also reported that cohabitation is likely less influential on a
person's microbial profile than other factors like biological sex and what part
of the body is being studied. In addition, the microbial profile from a
person's body usually looks more like their own microbiome than like that of
their significant other.
The
analyses revealed stronger correlations in some sites than in others. For
example, microbial communities on the inner thigh were more similar among
people of the same biological sex than between cohabiting partners. Computer
algorithms could differentiate between men and women with 100 percent accuracy
by analyzing inner thigh samples alone, suggesting that a person's biological
sex can be determined based on that region, but not others.
The
researchers also found that the microbial profiles of sites on a person's left
side -- like hands, eyelids, armpits, or nostrils -- strongly resemble those on
their right side. Of all the swab sites, the least microbial diversity was
found on either side of the outer nose.
See:
Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle
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Pharmaceutical Microbiology