428: Microbes May Manage Mysteries

This episode: The skin microbes that people leave behind may be
used to identify them, even after other people have touched the
same surface!


Download Episode (5.4 MB, 7.9 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Actinobacillus lignieresii

Takeaways



The microbial communities in and on our bodies are highly
complex and highly varied between people; this complexity has
raised the question of whether the microbes that people
transfer onto things they touch could be used in forensics, to
track their movement and activity, like fingerprints or DNA
evidence. One difficulty with this approach is that microbe
communities are constantly changing as conditions change or
other microbes are introduced.


 


This study simulated such microbial tracking in a couple of
scenarios, such as touching door handles in an office building
and touching various surfaces in a home in a mock burglary.
Tracking a person on door handles worked fairly well for up to
an hour after the contact, even if other people had also
touched the same door handles. However, the accuracy of
identifying the "burglar" in a home was not very high, but
modifying the analysis from looking at the community as a whole
to only rare microbes relatively unique to an individual
improved the results.




Journal Paper:
Hampton-Marcell JT, Larsen P, Anton T, Cralle L, Sangwan N, Lax
S, Gottel N, Salas-Garcia M, Young C, Duncan G, Lopez JV, Gilbert
JA. 2020. Detecting personal microbiota signatures at artificial
crime scenes. Forensic Sci Int 313:110351.


Other interesting stories:



Using slime molds to model the gravity-based web of gas and
dark matter between galaxies

Using bacteria to produce antibody-like molecules (paper)




 


Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot
com. Thanks for listening!


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