Kitchen Sponges Are Bacterial Paradise

Source: ScienceAlert, by Pete Dockrill

Analyzing over 220,000 pyrosequencing reads collected from 14 sponges, researchers from Germany found:

Your sponge is naaaasty!

No amount of running in dishwashers, treating with hot sudsy water, or putting in the microwave will change the simple fact that your sponge is .... a sponge for bacteria.

Of the 360 OTUs (Operational Taxanomic Unit), 5 out of the 10 most common OTUs were potential pathogens. This included Acinetobacter johnsonii, Moraxella osloensis, and Chryseobacterium hominis.

Take home:

To be clean, replace your sponge once a week.

Original Article: Microbiome analysis and confocal microscopy of used kitchen sponges reveal massive colonization by Acinetobacter, Moraxella and Chryseobacterium species. Cardinale et al. Nature Reports.