You’re Leaving a Bacterial Fingerprint on Your Keyboard

The bacterial communities that live on human skin may form a bacterial fingerprint on the items that you touch. 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