MICROBIAL COWORKERS: Infrared (top) and normal (bottom; right) images of microbiologist Jessica Green taking a built-environment microbiome sample from a desktop surface in a classroom at the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon.KATE LAUE
Although we normally associate microbial assemblages with mammalian guts, it turns out buildings have microbiomes too. For the last decade, Scott Kelley, a biologist at San Diego State University, and his fellow pioneers in the growing field of built-environment microbiology have been studying factors that shape those microbial communities and how they affect the health of people who work and live in them. “Westerners spend about 90 percent of their time indoors,” says Kelley. “We would like to know exactly what’s in there and who’s growing. Is it dangerous? How different is it from the outside?”
JEFF KLIINEAs a postdoc in the lab of Norman Pace at the University of Colorado Boulder, Kelley spent his days sampling things like shower curtains and pools. As he and his colleagues catalog the bacteria and fungi populating our homes, offices, and hospitals, they’ve highlighted the importance of variables such as geography (PLOS ONE, 7:e37849, 2012) and building ventilation (ISME J, 6:1469-79, 2012). But they have run up against one very important and hard-to-isolate variable: building materials. The question of whether different types of indoor surfaces or building materials favor some microbial communities over others has complicated indoor-microbiome research because building material can’t always be separated from other variables, such as location or usage. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an office with carpet on a surface other than the floor, or ceiling tiles that ever have contact with the bottoms of people’s feet. “It’s hard to decouple all these different factors,” says Sean Gibbons, a postdoc who studies human microbiomes at MIT. He says most indoor-microbiome research has not tried to control for the types or locations of surfaces sampled within a given room.
Kelley and colleagues at ...
