Microbial communities from Indian Currency Notes, India - C3
Fomites are a well-known source of microbial infections and previous studies have provided insights into the resident microbiome of fomites from various sources. Paper currency notes are one of the most commonly exchanged objects and its potential to transmit pathogenic organisms has been well recognized. Approaches to identify the resident microbiome of currency notes have been largely limited to culture dependent approaches except for recent reports which have used 16S ribosomal RNA based approaches which provide insights only into the taxonomical distribution of the resident microbiome. Recent techniques including shotgun sequencing provide an advantage of gene level characterization and copy number estimation in metagenome. We studied the resident microbiome using a shotgun metagenome approach. Metagenomic DNA isolated from frequently circulated denominations of Indian currency notes was sequenced using Illumina Hiseq.