The Tree of Life: cell phones

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Guest post on "The phone microbiome" from Georgia Barguil in Jack Gilbert's lab

Today we have a very special guest post from Georgia Barguil in Jack Gilbert's group at University of Chicago / Argonne National Lab. Georgia has been coordinating analyses of microbial surveys that have been a collaboration between me and Jack (although really driven by Jack and his lab in most ways). The study subject: cell phones and shoes. The study locations: conferences and meetings in order to have participation in microbial surveys by "citizen" scientists of one kind or another. We did this together at the AAAS meeting. And then Gilbert's lab did this at ThirstDC. And then I did this at SciFoo at Google HQ. We are working on a paper on this and wanted to get some results out to the community so Georgia wrote up this post.

Ever wanted to know what bacteria are on your shoes and phones? Of course you have! Here we explored the bacteria that call shoes and phones home; the shoes and phones belonged to employees at Google’s Headquarters, and to participants at the Thirst DC and AAAS annual meeting conferences over 2012 (Fig. 1). Altogether, 84 phones (34 from GoogleHQ, 23 from ThirstDC and 27 from AAAS) and 68 shoes (15 from SciFoo, 24 from ThirstDC and 29 from AAAS) were sampled. The DNA of these samples was extracted and the bacteria were identified by sequencing and subsequent computational analysis of a key gene (16SrRNA) found in all bacteria. Here we show some of the results.

Fig. 1: Map showing the 3 sampling locations: AAAS in Vancouver, SciFoo in California and ThirstDC in Washington

There are quite a lot of microorganisms found in these environments, as you can see in the graph below (Fig. 2), where each bar represents a sample and each color represents a group of bacteria. Also by looking at the chart you can see that the bacteria that live on phones and shoes are different, and found in different proportions. Actually, by comparing the bacterial profile from an unidentified sample with this collection, we could tell you whether that sample was from a phone or a shoe!

Fig. 2: Genus-level diversity and abundance of bacteria associated to phone and shoe samples.

In the shoe samples you can see a lot more colors, which implies that the shoes are home to more bacterial groups than the phones. Out of 560 groups of bacteria found, there were 90 that favored either shoes or phones; 70 of these groups favored the shoe environment while the other 20 favored the phone. Some of the groups that preferred the phones were:

A new report is out with a discussion of microbes on cell phones: Study: Cellphones can be more germ-infested than toilet handle | News - Home. Not sure what was done in the study but regardless it seems to be focused on culture based work. And as is usually, the finding of some microbes related to ones known to cause disease leads to the inevitable conclusion that we must kill everything on the phones.

It seems to me that we need a bit more detail on what microbes are found on cell phones before bringing out the cleaners and the irradiation and such.

Also see: