麻豆影院

Audio Script

Home sweet microbe: House dust can predict where you live, gender of occupants
Aug. 26, 2015听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Noah Fierer
The dust collecting in your average American household harbors a menagerie of bacteria and fungi, and as researchers from CU-麻豆影院 and North Carolina State University have discovered, it may be able to predict not only the geographic region of a given home, but how many men and women live there and the presence of a pet as well, says CU-麻豆影院 researcher Noah Fierer (Fear).
CUT 1 鈥淲e live with an enormous diversity of organisms in our homes. And it just isn鈥檛 our husbands and wives and children it鈥檚 also our pets and the microorganisms that live in our homes. (:12) So we were really interested the diversity of microorganisms found in the home.鈥� (:18)
Fierer, an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is co-author of the study. He says researchers examined roughly 1,200 homes across the continental U.S. The findings, he says, highlight the degree to which these organisms can tell a story about the homes they inhabit.
CUT 2 鈥淲hat we found was that in an average home you can have thousands of different bacterial and fungal taxa in an individual home. (:09) So we live with this broad diversity of different microorganisms in our homes. Some which could be, for example, potential allergens, many, which could actually be beneficial, and most, which are probably innocuous 鈥� completely harmless.鈥� (:22)
He says fungal communities tend to be more predictive of a home鈥檚 location while bacterial communities provide clues about the identity of its residents.
CUT 3 鈥淭he best predictor of what types of fungi you find in your home is where you live. And the main reason for this is most of the fungi we find in the home, not all, but many of the fungi we find in the home come from out side the home - from the soils, from the surrounding plants.鈥� (:14)
For bacteria it鈥檚 a different story. From the dust samples, he says he could confidently predict which homes had pets such as cats or dogs and, to a slightly lesser extent, the gender ratio of the residents. Homes with only male occupants, for example, will have a different bacterial makeup than those with both male and female occupants.
CUT 4 鈥淭o some degree we saw a subtle effect of whether there were women in the household on the types of bacteria found in the home and this was subtle and it鈥檚 something we are currently investigating to see if that finding is robust. (:13) And our guess is that these differences between homes with women versus homes without is just driven by the fact that men and women harbor different bacteria on our bodies.鈥� (:22)
The new findings were published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
-CU-