Beware! Don’t leave a bacterial fingerprint behind you in a “crime scene” or elsewhere!
Your skin is more than what you think it is. Even if you don’t leave a “visible” fingerprint on my laptop monitor, on your car windows, or anywhere else, you are leaving millions of bacteria there. What’s new? We all new that our fingers are a wonderful niche where invisible bacteria thrive?
What IS new is that these bacteria are highly diagnostic too. Tell me which bacteria you left behind; I tell you who you are. Thus claims a paper by Noah Fierer and coworkers from Colorado…
Fierer, N., Lauber, C., Zhou, N., McDonald, D., Costello, E., & Knight, R. (2010). Forensic identification using skin bacterial communities Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1000162107
It's a MicrobeFul World! 