Microbial DNA in Human Body Can Be Used to Identify Individuals

This article is about how scientists are now able to identify a person based on the collective DNA of the microbes in your body. Human-genomics researchers have grappled with privacy concerns for years. In 2013, scientists showed that they could name five people who had taken part anonymously in the international 1,000 Genomes project, by cross-referencing their DNA with a genealogy database that also contained ages, locations and surnames.

More recently, the microbiome’s influence on our health and behaviour has become a hot research topic. The data from human-microbiome studies tend to end up in public repositories, but is not certain whether microbiomes were permanent enough in individuals to identify them over time. It states that stool samples offered the best microbiome signatures and a person’s first sample could be linked to their second sample 86% of the time. Whereas skin samples could only be linked accurately one in every four times. 

The issue that comes up is privacy. Microbiomes could pose a privacy risk because they inevitably get jumbled up with human DNA. The odds of identifying someone on the basis of their microbiome is low but the proper steps should be taken in order to protect privacy. A director from the National Human Genome Research Institute said that an overreaction could slow the understanding of the microbiome. She also stated that we would want to keep it in open access because of the value it adds to science. 

Reference:

Callaway, E. (2015, May 13). Microbial DNA in Human Body Can Be Used to Identify Individuals. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microbial-dna-in-human-body-can-be-used-to-identify-individuals/