Molecular Analysis of Bacterial Microbiota on Brazilian Currency Note Surfaces

Tairacan Augusto Pereira da Fonseca, Rodrigo Pessôa and Sabri Saeed Sanabani
Additional contact information
Tairacan Augusto Pereira da Fonseca: Clinical Laboratory, Department of Pathology, LIM 03, Hospital das Clínicas (HC), School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 05403 000, Brazil
Rodrigo Pessôa: Clinical Laboratory, Department of Pathology, LIM 03, Hospital das Clínicas (HC), School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 05403 000, Brazil
Sabri Saeed Sanabani: Clinical Laboratory, Department of Pathology, LIM 03, Hospital das Clínicas (HC), School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 05403 000, Brazil

IJERPH, 2015, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-13

Abstract: Currency notes have been implicated as a vehicle for transmitting community-acquired bacterial infections. However, the overall diversity of the bacterial population residing on banknotes is still unknown in Brazil. In this study, we aimed to investigate the overall bacterial population from 150 different Brazilian Rial (R$) notes in circulation using a culture-independent Illumina massively parallel sequencing approach of the 16S rRNA genes . Samples were randomly collected from three different street markets or “feiras” in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. Taxonomical composition revealed the abundance of Proteobacteria phyla, followed by Firmicutes and Streptophyta, with a total of 1193 bacterial families and 3310 bacterial genera. Most of these bacterial genera are of human, animal, and environmental origins. Also, our analysis revealed the presence of some potential pathogenic bacterial genera including Salmonella , Staphylococcus , and Klebsiella . The results demonstrate that there is a tremendous diversity of bacterial contamination on currency notes, including organisms known to be opportunistic pathogens. One of the factors that may contribute to the richness of bacterial diversity in currency notes is personal hygiene. Thus, our results underscore the need to increase public awareness of the importance of personal hygiene of money handlers who also handle food.

Keywords: bacteria; microbiome; metagenomics; currency notes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/10/13276/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/10/13276/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:12:y:2015:i:10:p:13276-13288:d:57625

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().