Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, new study shows

[InfoSecErik]

I remember hearing about this sort of thing from a grad student a few years back. She pointed out that there were interesting privacy concerns with these microbiomes, given how we leave traces of it.

[a_gnostic]

Isn't this one of the reasons kissing evolved; To develop resistance to each others' microbiome, and not allergies?

[shermantanktop]

That wasn’t in my copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

A little more seriously, that sounds like a behavior that would be beneficial for many creatures, and yet only a few do anything like that. If it were effective, it’d be common.

[yieldcrv]

applying intention to evolution is a bad habit

there are only accidents or happenstance that might turn out to be sex linked traits and not end life before a viable offspring is created

if it sounds nihilistic, that’s also accurate

[pengaru]

I can't think of a more effective means of determining if a potential mate is deathly ill than smelling and tasting their mouth, before diving in downstairs.

[JoshTko]

Kind of intuitive. Bacteria evolve rapidly, the ones that are most fine tuned to an individual's specific body will be the one that persist the longest. PH, temp, diet, and variance of these by month going to be unique person to person. Takeaway seems to be that antibiotics should not be used unless absolutely necessary.

[samstave]

isnt this the basics behind stool microbiome transplants (basically you take gut material from A and put it in B, B then has their gut micro enhanced by donor A....

So - we should find the healthiest of people against a particular disease A and then transplant gut micros to B and determine outcomes sans medicine.

[bluGill]

That is the idea, but does it work in practice or do the transplanted microbs cause problems?