A year long study at the University of Chicago Medicine has tracked the microbiome of a newly opened hospital, the study, “Bacterial colonization and succession in a newly opened hospital,” began two months before the University of Chicago Medicine opened its new hospital, the Center for Care and Discovery, on Feb. 23, 2013, and continued for 10 months afterward.

The researchers collected more than 10,000 samples. They were able to detect microbial DNA in 6,523. These came from 10 patient care rooms and two adjoining nursing stations, one caring for surgical patients and the other, on a different floor, for cancer patients.

The study author Jack Gilbert, PhD, director of the Microbiome Center and professor of surgery at the University of Chicago and group leader in Microbial Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory, said “The Hospital Microbiome Project is the single biggest microbiome analysis of a hospital performed, and one of the largest microbiome studies ever.”

Read the full article at sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2017/05/24/yearlong-survey-tracks-the-microbiome-of-a-newly-opened-hospital