You’re Leaving a Bacterial Fingerprint on Your Keyboard

From Wired.com (March 15):

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.

“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. [read more]

Isn't that nice to know! Ha! I expect to see this technology used in a upcoming CSI episode.