Microflora prints

Burglars will be identified by microbiome fingerprint

Ekaterina Rusakova, N+1

Microbiologists have proposed a new way to identify an intruder who has made his way into the house – by microbiome. Each person has a unique composition, so it is possible to collect samples from surfaces that the thief allegedly touched, determine the composition of microorganisms and compare it with the microbiomes of people living in the house. The authors spoke about their study "The Burglar's Microbiome" at the conference of the American Microbiological Society ASM Microbe, which took place on June 7-11 in Atlanta.

According to various estimates, 30-37 trillion microorganisms "live" in the human body, which form the microflora of the skin, intestines, oral cavity and some other organs. The composition of the microbiota is unique for each person, while every hour people secrete about a million biological particles, a kind of "microflora prints" that can be collected and analyzed.

This was done by American microbiologists under the leadership of Jack Gilbert from the University of Chicago. First, they conducted a small pilot study and checked whether people leave microorganisms on their mobile phone and shoes. It turned out that a person can be recognized by the "fingerprints" of his microflora. Then the researchers staged false "break-ins" of ten houses in different cities of Illinois. Before and after the experiment, scientists collected microbiota samples from the skin and from the nasal cavity from residents of houses in which a "break-in" was to occur, and from "thieves". In total, more than 400 people participated in the experiment. The researchers then collected microbiota samples from the surfaces the intruder had touched.

The composition of the microbial community was determined by scientists by analyzing the sequence of the 16S RNA gene, which differs in different taxa of microorganisms. They analyzed more than eight thousand unique microbial prints and were able to calculate the burglars with 70 percent accuracy.

"In this study, we were among the first to use the microbiome as a forensic tool and studied unique markers, rather than changes in the structure of the microbial community," says lead author of the study Jarrad Hampton–Marcell (Jarrad Hampton-Marcell) from the University of Illinois at Chicago."Further improvement in the determination of stable markers will allow the use of the human microbiome as an additional tool for determining a person's identity when investigating a crime scene."

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