Microbes could change how buildings support human health

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In a space no bigger than an inch, millions of beings are actively living, working and surviving. These compact communities aren’t something out of science fiction. They really exist everywhere in our environment. Microbiomes—collections of millions of microbes like bacteria—populate the world around us and even exist in countless areas inside of our bodies. From our digestive tract to the high-touch surfaces in the places where we spend our lives, microbes populate our planet in infinitesimally high numbers and at staggeringly high rates.

Many people might immediately assume these cultured colonies are always dangerous, but according to Dr. Jack Gilbert, author and Professor of Pediatrics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, that’s not the case. In fact, he posits microbes can even aid in the fight against disease transmission. His hypothesis may not be as far fetched as once thought—after all, microbes play a key role in our body’s own immune response.

“The immune system and our microbiomes are two sides of the same coin. If you disrupt one, it affects the other. There’s a feedback loop between the two—they’re constantly interacting,” Gilbert says. “There’s a relationship between a disrupted microbiome in our bodies and our susceptibility to infection and exacerbation of that infection.”

Gilbert stresses the healthy balance of our personal microbiomes. Through eating well and adhering to healthy behaviors, we can positively impact our response to potential infection. However, his most recent research is examining ways to incorporate “good” microbes to help fight infection in our environments by eliminating potentially harmful bacteria and viruses on surfaces.

Microbial impact on buildings and spaces
To begin, Gilbert notes that urban and rural environments often differ greatly in their microbial diversity and, depending on the environment, certain types of unhealthy bacteria can thrive in urban spaces. Bacteria diversity may be part of understanding how the right microbes can attack harmful organisms in our space.

“If you go into a rural environment—we had once studied an Amish child’s bedroom for example—there’s much higher diversity of microbial life than in many urban environments. In that bedroom, a myriad number of the ‘bad bugs’ are swamped out by the majority of other benign organisms,” Gilbert says. “In that instance, it creates an immune stimulating environment through its diversity.”

But that doesn’t mean spaces should be permitted to wantonly collect bacteria, Gilbert stresses. Cleaning protocols are key to managing microbial diversity and developing a healthy, stable environment.

“Should we continue to clean? Yes! But we should also open more windows. We should increase the kinds of things that are shedding diverse bacteria in our environments—like dogs—who bring a lot of microbes into our home and increase diversity,” Gilbert says. “It’s a very complex issue to understand how to incorporate ‘good’ microbes to eliminate the ‘bad’ ones.”

Adding plants to a space, increasing access to natural environments and moving around are other ways Gilbert encourages people to create a healthy, more diverse microbiome.

Adding microbes to fight against diseases
Currently, Gilbert and his team are busy studying how to introduce helpful organisms into an environment, alongside existing cleaning protocols, to combat the spread of viruses like influenza or COVID-19.

“We’re looking for ways to add bacteria like bacillus into buildings. It’s a type of benign bacteria that survives very well on surfaces. So if we cover surfaces with it, other pathogens introduced to that area will not survive,” Gilbert says. “We’re still looking to fully understand this process, but it offers a fascinating route to overcome the current paradigm of cleaning something for it only to be contaminated again with pathogens in seconds.”

But Gilbert and his team aren’t just satisfied with eliminating viruses. They believe diversifying a microbiome properly could bolster the way people’s bodies respond to potential illnesses.

“Using microbes to kill harmful bacteria isn’t the end of the conversation. Imagine if we could bolster the immune system at the same time. It could have huge impacts in hospitals, long-term care facilities and elder care homes,” Gilbert says. “These products could be applied—if financially viable—to commercial spaces, too. Think of an office building reducing the spread of disease in an invisible way, avoiding harmful chemicals and going so far as to improve the health of the people in those environments.”

Gilbert admits the research is still in the early phases, but he and his team are hopeful.

“It’s an aspirational thought right now,” he says. “But I hope we could expand our findings to one day protect the environments and places of the future.”

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