ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, WILLIAM BARTON
Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York has the Statue of Liberty, and Rome has the Colosseum, but a new study finds that cities also have other signature distinctions, even if they never appear on a postcard: their resident microbes. Over a three-year span, dozens of scientists took nearly 5,000 samples from 60 cities around the globe. As reported in Cell on Wednesday (May 26), these locales appear to have distinct microbial communities that include thousands of species of viruses and bacteria that had never been documented before.
The samples were taken between 2015 and 2017 on a variety of surfaces in transit stations of major cities. From ticket counters to turnstiles to seats on the subway, the scientists would swab surfaces for three minutes to gather genetic material for sequencing. The data, which the researchers uploaded to the open-source database MetaSUB, showed that the ...
