Dirty Keyboards

Good band name, but also something we all have:

In a new study led by microbiologists Rob Knight and Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers swabbed three different keyboards and nine mice for bacteria, then compared the genomic variation between the communities to deduce whose hands had been touching what. The people were clearly identifiable from the bacterial communities they’d transferred to their computer input devices.

“The results demonstrate that bacterial DNA can be recovered from relatively small surfaces, that the composition of the keyboard-associated communities are distinct across the three keyboards, and that individuals leave unique bacterial ‘fingerprints’ on their keyboards,” wrote Knight and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results are the latest to show the variety and complexity of the bacterial communities living in a variety of different human ecosystems like the gut, saliva and skin. The Human Microbiome Project at the Institute for Genome Scientists is out to catalog and understand the relationships between our bacteria and ourselves. Early results suggest “our microbial partners may be essential for our survival as a species.”

I suppose it's not much of a surprise our keyboards contain bacteria, but as a compulsive hand washer, it grosses me out. I turned my keyboard upside down the other day, and about 10 meals worth of crumbs came out. Enjoy.