mGPS uses bacteria for navigation. It shows where you have been

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“Unlike human DNA, the human microbiome changes constantly as we come into contact with different environments,” says Eran Elhaik, a biologist at Lund University and lead author of the study.

By tracking where your microorganisms have been recently, we can understand the spread of disease, identify potential sources of infection, and locate the emergence of microbial resistance. This tracking also provides key forensic information that can be used in investigations.

– explains Eran Elhaik from Lund University

Using small samples, scientists have managed to turn long lists of the bacteria we carry into geographic fingerprints. It is not only about individual species of bacteria, but also about their proportions in the samples.

The artificial intelligence has been trained on vast amounts of microbiome data from various environmentsincluding 4,135 samples from the MetaSUB database, containing microbial genomes collected from metros and urban areas in 53 cities, 237 soil samples from 18 countries and 131 sea water samples from nine reservoirs. Scientists have named this tool Geographic Structure of Microbiome PopulationsThat is mGPS.

How effective is biological “GPS”?

It can be said that it was extremely high, because mGPS was able to distinguish two subway stations in Hong Kong that were only 172 meters apart. The identification of samples as coming from urban areas was 92%, and the recognition of 31 cities using the current AI model has an efficiency of an impressive 87%.

Interestingly, the biggest difficulty was identifying samples from the London Underground. This was attributed to the unusually high amount of dirt, at least compared to the Hong Kong metro, where samples were described as absolutely pristine.