What Is Living In Your Home?

We don't know much about the minuscule organisms that live all around us in our own homes. Are they good? Bad? The Wild Life Team from NC State University want to find out -- and you can help.

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Science

The Wild Life of Our Homes

The species living around you and on you affect your health and well-being. Some are deadly. Some are totally necessary, like the good species in your gut and on your skin. Many, perhaps most, are not yet named or understood. Wouldn’t you like to know what these species are that are all around you? And, wouldn’t you like to know how we are changing the species that are living with us and in us?

Our research group seeks to understand how the ways in which we live influence who we live with -- think mites, microbes, and protists, oh my! We want to know if and how our modern and increasingly urbanized ways of life have consequences on our health and the other species that live around us.

It is in this spirit of exploration and discovery that we’ve launched the Wild Life of Our Homes project. We’ve asked citizen scientists in urban and rural homes across North America to take samples from key domestic biomes – door frames, refrigerators, pillows, and even themselves! We’re then using high tech analyses (including metagenomic pyrosequencing, where the genes of a whole community of organisms, not just isolated individual species, are sequenced) to figure out exactly who and what is living among us. We’ll take a good hard look at the resulting data, but we’re also going to share it with our participating citizen scientists who will help us interpret and make sense of the findings.

We’ve been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic interest in our project and have had many more volunteers step forward than we have the resources to include. To date, we have great representation of people living in temperate climates and yet, we’d like to be able to make comparisons between the wild life living in those homes and the wild life inhabiting households in more extreme, colder and warmer environments -- like the living quarters of those researchers that brave the extreme winters on the top of Mount Washington, NH, or in scorching summers in Death Valley. In these environments, climate constrains the fate of humans but also, almost invariably, the species that live around and on humans.

Consequently, we’re asking you, SciFunders, to help us fund the sampling and genetic analyses of 150 more houses, all located in extreme environments, particularly those at higher elevations or higher latitudes.

Curious about exactly what kind of sampling we’re talking about? Glad you asked. We’ll have participants swab at least 10 different places in their homes including their inner and outer door sill, an outside doorknob, a cutting board, their refrigerator, kitchen counter, toilet seat, TV screen, pillow case, and the palms of their hands. That’s a lot of swabbing and a lot of genetic sequencing, which alas doesn’t come cheap – We figure it costs about $100/household, and we’re looking to add 150 more households to our study.

Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the species living with us and on us in different types of homes and environments. With your help, we can increase our sample size to represent homes in more extreme, colder or warmer climates, that in turn, will allow us to broaden our study and begin asking exciting questions about how the distribution of species might change as the coldest places become warmer and many of the very warmest places become downright hot.

We will consider the impacts of climate change in two ways. First, we seek to understand the composition of the species in environments that are already extreme. That much we can do almost immediately (Results will take months, not years). Second, we will set up a subset of homes as "long term ecological research houses," that we can revisit over the years as climates change.

The first results from one of our house samples just came in and will be posted here shortly so anyone can consider just what sort of wilderness we are studying and, of course, just what might be living around you.

NOTE: We'd like to make sure all the fuelers who contributed to our project receive their rewards - RocketHub only shares your email address with us. We'll follow-up with fuelers by email so please use a legit email address!  Thanks!