Your metropolis has its personal microbial “signature”

By Robert Preidt
HealthDay reporter

THURSDAY, May 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) – Every city has its own mix of tell-tale microbes, new research shows.

“If you gave me your shoe, I could tell you the city in the world you came from with about 90% accuracy,” said the study’s senior author Christopher Mason, director of the WorldQuant quantitative initiative Forecast in New York City.

His team analyzed microbes from the air and the surface of public transport systems and hospitals in 60 cities on six continents.

“Every city has its own ‘molecular echo’ of the microbes that define it,” said Mason, who is also a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

The more than 4,700 samples analyzed in the study were collected over a three-year period as part of the first systematic global catalog of urban microbial ecosystems.

Not only did the researchers find that cities have different microbial signatures, but they also identified a core set of 31 species found in most (97%) of the samples in the cities studied.

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In total, more than 4,200 species of microorganisms have been identified, but researchers expect further sampling to find species that have never been seen before. Their results were published in the journal Cell on May 26th.

Mason began collecting and analyzing microbial samples on the New York subway system in 2013.

After he published his first results, researchers from around the world contacted him to conduct similar studies in their own cities.

In response, Mason developed a protocol that other scientists could use to collect samples.

In 2015 he founded an international consortium that has since been collecting samples from air, water and wastewater in addition to hard surfaces.

“People often think a rainforest is an abundance of biodiversity and new molecules for therapy, but the same goes for a subway railing or a bench,” Mason said in a press release in a magazine.

More information

The American Museum of Natural History is more concerned with microbes.

SOURCE: Cell, press release, May 26, 2021