Toothbrushes Might Not Be Covered in Poo After All
Photo: Christof Koepsel (Getty Images)
If you’ve worried that your toothbrush, being usually in the same room as your toilet, is perpetually covered in microscopic fecal matter, well, here’s some relief. According to a new study, our brushes are full of bacteria found in our mouths, but they’re not full of bacteria from our guts. In other words, our toothbrushes don’t seem to be nearly as disgusting as many of us feared.
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The research comes courtesy of scientists from Northwestern University in Illinois. They’ve been working on cataloguing the native bacteria from people’s toothbrushes donated through the mail. DNA was lifted from these brushes and then analyzed all at once, giving the researchers a broad view of a toothbrush’s bacterial neighborhood, or what scientists call a microbiome. They compared these microbiomes to those previously sampled from people’s mouths and guts via the Human Microbiome
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