US researchers took samples from shower heads and used toothbrushes: They found more than 600 viruses, most of which were little or completely unknown.
The average American spends 93 percent of their time in the built environment and nearly 70 percent of that time in their home. Time to see what it looks like there, said microbiologists at Northwestern University in Illinois. She was particularly interested in the bathroom.
During their analysis, they found that there is an extremely diverse collection of viruses on the surface of showerheads and toothbrushes – most of them have never been seen before. They examined 34 toothbrush and 92 shower heads and identified 22 complete, 232 high-quality, and 362 medium-quality viral operational taxonomic units (OTUs). An OTU is a group of bacteria or microbes that are very similar.
The microorganisms found are bacteriophages or “phages”, i.e. viruses that only infect bacteria. The richness of this viral community correlates with the bacterial richness, but not with Shannon or Simpson indices: of the high-quality viral OTUs with sufficient coverage (614), 532 were associated with 32 bacterial families, of which only Sphingomonadaceae, Burkholderiaceae and Caulobacteraceae were found on both toothbrushes and shower heads.
