Lillis Hall at the University of OregonWIKIMEDIA, VISITOR7Various aspects of a building’s design and use, including the number of doors per room, its average occupancy, and the way air circulates, can influence the makeup of the bacterial communities that occupy the space, according to a study published this week (January 29) in PLOS One.
The research comes from biologists and architects at the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center, who vacuumed up dust samples from around the university’s Lillis Hall, then analyzed bacterial DNA from the samples to estimate microbial diversity. “What we did in our paper was ask this really fundamental question,” center director Jessica Green told Popular Science. “Given this hypothesis that is becoming more and more actualized—that the indoor microbiome is important to health—do we have any control over what kind of microbes are indoors or out?”
The team identified nearly 33,000 different major groups of bacteria in its survey, with different room types comprising a unique microbial composition. Known gut bacteria were common in bathrooms, for example, while offices with windows tended ...
