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We Share a Biological Connection with Our Cell Phones

When you're changing the wallpaper on your phone, you're customizing it in more ways than one.
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Your cell phone is crawling with bacteria, that much we already knew. But now we also know that each person's cell phone has its own microbiome that pretty closely reflects the bacterial colonies that grow on its owner's thumbs.

In other words, every time you touch your cell phone, you're helping to grow your own personal bacterial biome, replete with strep and staph and a few other highly common bacterial species. But you're also transferring lots of other, much more rare bacteria that's specific to your cell phone.

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In a study published today in PeerJ, researchers from the University of Oregon found that, on average, 22 percent of the bacteria found on your fingers is also found on your phone. Take a stranger's phone, and that number is just 17 percent.

"We asked a basic question: Does your phone resemble you? Or put another way, does your own phone carry microbes that resemble your own micro biome more so than another person's micro biome?" James Meadow, the study's lead author, wrote.

The answer to that question was an easy "yes," though, obviously, your phone picks up many more bacterial species from other places. If a 22 percent overlap seems low, consider the fact that cultures taken from two separate fingers on the same hand will share just 32 percent of the same bacterial species. Your fingers generally have the same type of environment—they're fleshy and finger-y, while a cell phone screen is glass, cold (or sometimes very hot, depending on if you're using it for a particularly graphics-intense operation), and goes all over the place.

"Our fingers are only one plausible source for microbes on our phones," Meadow wrote. "They may also be dispersed in from other parts of our body (e.g., the palm, mouth, face, or ears), our clothes or belongings, the people we interact with, and our surrounding built environment."

Interestingly, women were more likely to share more microbes with their phone than men. In fact, the bacterial makeup on women's index fingers was not significantly different from the community sampled from phones. The study's makeup was just 17 participants, so the numbers could potentially be swayed by a bigger sample size, but regardless, it appears as though we share at least some biological connection with our phones.

There's no reason to be particularly alarmed that there are such bacterial differences between phones, and handling someone else's phone isn't likely to be any more dangerous than shaking their hand (though the makers of Phone Soap might beg to differ). So, maybe, stay away from making phone calls on your sick friend's phone. But just know that, when you're changing the wallpaper on your phone, you're customizing it in more ways than one.