Live with a partner? You may be sharing more microbes than you think
Researchers found that couples who shared a home also shared a lot of oral microbes. Benambot/iStockphoto/Getty Images hide caption For the latest stories on the science of healthy living, subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter . A lot changes when you move in with your partner:
Researchers found that couples who shared a home also shared a lot of oral microbes. Benambot/iStockphoto/Getty Images hide caption
For the latest stories on the science of healthy living, subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter .
A lot changes when you move in with your partner: when you go to bed, what you eat for breakfast, and possibly your microbiome — the mishmash of bacteria that live in and on you. A study published this week in Cell Press Blue finds that cohabitating romantic partners share about 44% of their oral microbiome and 19% of their gut microbiome.
First author and computational biologist Vitor Heidrich of the University of Trento, Italy says that his lab was investigating potential sources of the microbes inside us "because before birth we don't have a microbiome, so they must be coming from somewhere."
Previous evidence has existed that people who live together share microbiomes. But the new study — which analyzed microbiome DNA data of 430 people across 207 households in Italy and Fiji — quantifies the transmission rate by relationship and includes the oral microbiome as well.
"It's exciting — the oral microbiome is just harder to study, so it's exciting that they're able to pick up these signals," says Ilana Brito , associate professor in biomedical engineering at Cornell University and an expert on microbiome transmission. She was not directly involved with this study but her 2019 study on microbiome transmission among Fijians was among the data sources Heidrich used for his study.
As for how the microbe strains were transmitted, Heidrich has a few ideas. It could be from eating from the same dishes or toothbrushes touching in the bathroom, for example. The research team found that romantic partners on average share more of their oral microbiome (44%) than cohabitants overall did (26%).
Heidrich calls it "a nice confirmation … that when people exchange saliva directly, such as through kissing, you indeed see much more strain sharing."
