— currentsinbiology: Not under the skin, but on...

Not under the skin, but on it: Living together brings couples’ microbiomes together

Couples who live together share many things: Bedrooms, bathrooms, food, and even bacteria. After analyzing skin microbiomes from cohabitating couples, microbial ecologists at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, found that people who live together significantly influence the microbial communities on each other’s skin.

The commonalities were strong enough that computer algorithms could identify cohabitating couples with 86 percent accuracy based on skin microbiomes alone, the researchers report this week in mSystems, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

However, the researchers also reported that cohabitation is likely less influential on a person’s microbial profile than other factors like biological sex and what part of the body is being studied. In addition, the microbial profile from a person’s body usually looks more like their own microbiome than like that of their significant other.

“You look like yourself more than you look like your partner,” says Ashley Ross, who led the study while a graduate student in the lab of Josh Neufeld.