Longitudinal analysis of microbial interaction between humans and the indoor environment

By S. Lax, Daniel Patrick Smith, Jarrad T. Hampton-Marcell, S. Owens, K. Handley, Nicole Scott, Sean M. Gibbons, Peter E. Larsen, B. Shogan, Sophie J. Weiss and 10 more. Science, 2014

866 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Signature microbes follow you from house to house Householders share more than habitation; they also share inhabitants. In a diverse sample of U.S. homes, Lax et al. found that people and animals sharing homes shared their microbial communities (microbiota) too, probably because of skin shedding and hand and foot contamination. When families moved, their microbiological “aura” followed. If one person left the home even for a few days, their contribution to the microbiome diminished. These findings have implications not only for household identity and composition, but also for indicators of the members' health and well-being. Science, this issue p. 1048 Microbes colonize not only our guts, but also our homes. The bacteria that colonize humans and our built environments have the potential to influence our health. Microbial communities associated with seven families and their homes over 6 weeks were assessed, including three families that moved their home. Microbial communities differed substantially among homes, and the home microbiome was largely sourced from humans. The microbiota in each home were identifiable by family. Network analysis identified humans as the primary bacterial vector, and a Bayesian method significantly matched individuals to their dwellings. Draft genomes of potential human pathogens observed on a kitchen counter could be matched to the hands of occupants. After a house move, the microbial community in the new house rapidly converged on the microbial community of the occupants’ former house, suggesting rapid colonization by the family’s microbiota.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88a3bd10fb2504a0eec5e38d0dfaaa5a16637865

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Citations in the corpus

Identifying personal microbiomes using metagenomic codes (2015, background): “, health status, cohabitation (31), or sexually transmitted infections] based on microbiome data alone becomes increasingly real as the list of associations between microbiome features and subject environment, history, and lifestyle expands.”
Disease-specific Alterations in the Enteric Virome in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (2015, background): “Investigations have also shown that the home environment is a primary determinant of the individual’s bacterial microbiome and that humans are the primary vector of bacterial transmission between people living within the same household (Lax et al., 2014).”
Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics (2015, positive): “Recent work has shown that homes can create a specific microbiome profile or ‘‘aura’’ for families and that this profile travels with individuals (Lax et al., 2014).”
Natural history of the infant gut microbiome and impact of antibiotic treatments on strain-level diversity and stability (2015, background): “Bacterial strains evolve within the gut (43) and are also introduced from the external environment (for example, diet and household animals) (36, 37, 44).”
Temporal Stability of the Human Skin Microbiome (2016, neutral): “Strain-level analysis reveals that this stability is driven primarily by the maintenance of individual strains over time, rather than through the acquisition of prevalent microbes from the environment and other individuals (Lax et al., 2014).”
Social behavior and the microbiome (2015, background): “Such studies have identified both disease-causing microbes and antimicrobial-resistance genes among the taxa and sequences shared through social contact [15 ,32].”
Host genetic variation impacts microbiome composition across human body sites (2015, background): “Lastly, social contact and interaction with the environment have also been implicated in shaping the microbial flora in the gut and skin [20–22].”