You basically live here. What else does?
Refrigerators, indoor pools, airplanes, daycares, public bathrooms, shower curtains, water heaters, pillowcases---these are just a few of the places swabbed by enterprising biologists looking to understand the microbes that live with us
. By identifying the bacteria, archaea, molds, and other creatures picked up on their swabs (and there are plenty---we live in a sea of mostly harmless, possibly beneficial microorganisms), microbial ecologists have started to describe the indoor ecosystems in which we spend most of our lives. The latest study
to probe this, published in PLoS ONE, looks at the place where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours: the office. The researchers swabbed the chair, desk, phone, keyboard, and mouse of 90 offices in San Francisco, New York, and Tuscon (30 per city). The phone and the chair had the most bacterial cells on them, mostly bacteria from ...
