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New York – You may feel clean after this morning shower, but you carry an invisible cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi and chemicals every day.
This is one of the lessons of the first study to delve deeply into the human "exposome" – the collection of microbes, plant particles and chemicals that accompanies people when they move around the world.
In fact, if your personal exhibit was visible to the naked eye, the researchers stated that you would look like the character of Peanuts.
In the study, a small group of volunteers wore monitors with a special filter that trapped particles of air around them throughout their normal day.
When the researchers performed a genetic analysis of these samples, they found that each person was carrying a diverse cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi, plant particles, chemicals, and even "microscopic animals."
But the exact composition of this exponent varied considerably from person to person, even though he lived in a fairly narrow geographic area (the San Francisco Bay Area).
"It's a very interesting study," said Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital, in Oceanside, New York.
It's no secret that humans live in a world filled with invisible organisms and chemicals, said Glatt, who is also a spokesperson for the American Society of Infectious Diseases.
But this study provides a detailed overview of individual exposures, he said. And this could be a first step toward understanding how different environmental exposures affect human health, Glatt suggested.
"That's what we believe," agreed principal investigator Michael Snyder, a chair of genetics at Stanford University's School of Medicine in California.
"Health is totally dependent on genes and the environment," Snyder said. But it's clear that genes only explain a part of a person's vulnerability to various diseases, he added.
Much remains to be learned about the effects of environmental exposures, Snyder said.
At first, his team collected detailed information from 14 people who wore monitors the size of a matchbook on their arms for a week or a month. Snyder himself wore the device for two years.
The devices contained filters that captured the particles from the ambient air. These samples were returned to the laboratory for genetic analysis and chemical "profiling".
In general, the Snyder team found that the exposed people were diverse in the types of microorganisms and the chemicals that they contained – although the chemical DEET, an insect repellent, is ubiquitous.
"It was everywhere, which surprised me," Snyder said.
Otherwise, the composition of the exposome seemed to depend on factors such as weather, travel, pets and household chemicals, for example.
Snyder said his own home shows turned out to be "very fungal, rather than bacterial."
He connects this to the use of "green" paint in his home. The paint does not contain any substance called pyridine, which seems to maintain mushroom levels. Snyder also discovered that he had been exposed to eucalyptus in early spring – which, he said, gives clues to the culprit of his seasonal allergies.
According to the researchers, several known carcinogens have been detected in most chemical samples. However, they only know the chemicals present and not the amount of exposure.
If the idea of carrying a cloud of bacteria, fungi and chemicals makes you crack, Glatt pointed out this point: many of these exposures would be safe or even beneficial.
We know, for example, that if certain bacteria make people sick, many are "good" and necessary for human health.
Snyder agreed. For the most part, no one yet knows which components of the exposome are "good" and which ones are not, he said. And that can vary from one person to the other, he added.
To complicate matters, the exposome of a person is not static. It's "dynamic," Snyder said, and constantly evolving during his lifetime.
This makes it difficult to study how the exposome affects human health, Snyder said. "But I also think it can be done," he added.
He said his team planned to study larger groups of people in more diverse environments. They also want to simplify the technology used in the study so that one day people can use the devices themselves to track their own exhibits.
The results were published online September 20 Cell.
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