Showerheads and toothbrushes in your bathroom are teeming with an extremely diverse collection of viruses — most of which have never been seen before, warned a study on Wednesday.Showerheads and toothbrushes in your bathroom are teeming with an extremely diverse collection of viruses — most of which have never been seen before, warned a study on Wednesday.A team of microbiologists from Northwestern University in the US, identified more than 600 different viruses from samples collected from shower heads and toothbrushes. Surprisingly, no two samples were alike
The good news, the researchers said, is that these viruses do not target people. They target bacteria.
The microorganisms collected in the study are bacteriophage, or “phage,” — a type of virus that infects and replicates inside of bacteria.
While little is known about them, phage recently have garnered attention for their potential use in treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
The previously unknown viruses lurking in our bathrooms could become a treasure trove of materials for exploring those applications, revealed the study published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiomes.
“The number of viruses that we found is absolutely wild,” said indoor microbiologist Erica M. Hartmann, from Northwestern, who led the study.
“We found many viruses that we know very little about and many others that we have never seen before. It’s amazing how much untapped biodiversity is all around us. And you don’t even have to go far to find it; it’s right under our noses,” Hartmann, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern.
Hartmann used DNA sequencing to examine the viruses living on those same samples, and found “no overlap in virus types between showerheads and toothbrushes”.