Everyone's personal microbial cloud is so distinctive that researchers can identify someone just by studying the air in that individual’s room.
Like the Peanuts character, Pigpen, each of us emits a cloud of bacteria that is uniquely our own, according to a new study.
This "personal microbial cloud" is so distinctive that researchers can even identify someone just by studying the air in that individual’s room.
"We expected that we would be able to detect the
human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud," lead author James F. Meadow, a postdoctoral researcher formerly from the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon, said in a press release.