You might think that the more you clean, the less germy your home is.
That’s what Laura-Isobel McCall, a biochemist at the University of Oklahoma, thought she’d find when she started comparing microbes between rural and urban homes in Peru and Brazil.
“We expected that all the microbes would actually become less diverse with urbanization, and that’s not at all what we found for the fungi,” she says.
In a new study in Nature Microbiology, McCall and her co-authors found that the fungal diversity was actually higher in urban homes, and it might be because of peoples’ cleaning products and urban lifestyles.
“Maybe they’re scrubbing away all the bacteria and now you have this big open surface for fungi to grow on; maybe [the fungi] are also becoming more resistant to the cleaning agents that we use,” she says.
Many antibacterial cleaning solutions and sanitizers specifically target bacteria, which could clear space for other kinds of microbes to flourish. Fungi also have thick cell walls, which may make them harder to kill. And urban homes are designed to isolate people from the outside; they block out light and trap CO2, which could be creating hospitable environments for fungus to grow, McCall says.
Scrubbing Your House Of Bacteria Could Clear The Way For Fungus
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