Cities Have Unique Bacterial Fingerprints : DNews

Used to be you knew which city you were in from the food, the sports team, the historic sites, even the local brew. Now a team of microbiologists discovered they can tell cities apart by their unique bacterial fingerprints. The surprising finding was made after an intense study led by John Chase of Northern Arizona University's Department of Biological Sciences and Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics. He and his colleagues spent a year swabbing for samples at nine offices in San Diego, Flagstaff, and Toronto. They wanted to find out what kind of impact factors like geography, location in a room, seasons, and human interaction have on the microbial communities we spread around, called microbiomes.