We wanted to share this article from Smithsonian Magazine's science blog, about the Bacteria that lives on the fruits and vegatables you eat:
For the first time, researchers have sampled and Sequenced the DNA of the hundreds of varieties of bacteria that harmlessly live on the produce you buy at the grocery store. Their study, published today in PLOS ONE, revealed 17 to 161 families of bacteria on each of the fruits and vegetables they tested, with grapes, peaches and sprouts hosting the largest diversity of bacteria.
The researchers—Jonathan Leff and Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder—studied 11 types of produce in total: apples, grapes, lettuce, mushrooms, peaches, bell peppers, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts and mung bean sprouts. For each fruit or vegetable, they swabbed the surface, isolated the DNA from the swab, sequenced the DNA and analyzed which Bacterial family it fell into.
