In Canada, University of Waterloo researchers found that you and your partner have more in common than you think – including microbes on your body. After studying 10 couples living together, researchers could accurately match the couples up based on the microbes found on their skin with an 86 percent accuracy. They took over 300 skin swabs from 17 different parts of the body and found that couples living together had very similar microbiomes on their skin.
The most likely part of the body to match microbes was their feet, with the torso, navel and eyelids coming in close behind. Their hope is to expand the study to same-sex couples and different ethnicities and races to see if the microbiome results are similar and to use the knowledge to help reduce the spreading of microbes in shared spaces.