New research suggests each individual human has their own unique microbial "cloud," and these airborne bacteria can be traced back to their original source.
A team of researchers sequenced microbes from the air surrounding 11 different people within a sanitized experimental chamber, and found they could identify the occupant of the chamber within four hours by looking at the bacteria, PeerJ reported. The study included an analysis of suspended particulate matter and short-read 16S sequencing, and focused on looking at entire microbial profiles as a whole instead of identifying individual pathogens.
"We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud," said lead author James F. Meadow, a postdoctoral researcher formerly from the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon.
The findings provide insight into how the human microbiome is released into the surrounding environment, and could lead to new findings that offer a clearer picture of how airborne infectious diseases are spread within enclosed spaces such as buildings. The research could also have applications in forensic science; microbiome "clouds" could one day identify where an individual has been and where they have not.
"Our results confirm that an occupied space is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one, and and demonstrate for the first time that individuals release their own personalized microbial cloud," the authors concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the open access journal PeerJ.
