A Tiny, Living Identification Badge: Your Microbiome

When you watch a TV crime drama, seeing the crime scene technicians dusting for fingerprints is a matter of course. Lately, DNA evidence has been all the rage. But new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could point the way to a new identification tool—your microbiome. Biostatistics researcher Eric Franzosa and colleagues found that the specific combinations of strains of bacteria that live on and in a person can be used to identify that individual, even up to a year after the samples were taken.