How dirty is your office?
June 15, 2012 
2 Comments
16S rRNA sequencing of samples from 54 office-common surfaces in 3 different cities (New York, San Franscisco, Tuscon) revealed that offices of men are dirtier than these of women and the offices in San Francisco are the cleanest among the three cities. This is part of the results from Hewitt et al. published in PLoS ONE just recently. Overall they found “more than 500 bacterial genera from 20 different divisions” (Hewitt et al.) whereas most could be found on chairs and phones (see graph). But interestingly the bacterial population from Tuscon was significant different to the one from San Francisco and NewYork although the distance between Tuscon and San Francisco is smaller. From my point of view this is a great study showing that distribution is not as obvious as we think and that we haven’t revealed every secret on earth yet.
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