Molecules On Your Phone An Archive Of Your Lifestyle

The molecules you leave on your smartphone can be used to construct your personalized lifestyle sketches – including diet, health status and locations visited. By sampling the molecules, researchers at University of California San Diego, US, were able to construct lifestyle sketches for each phone’s owner. The study could have a number of applications, including criminal profiling and environmental exposure studies. We can imagine a scenario where a crime scene investigator comes across a personal object – like a phone, pen or key – without fingerprints or DNA, or with prints or DNA not found in the database. So, researchers thought, what if they take advantage of left-behind skin chemistry to tell them what kind of lifestyle that person has. Thirty-nine healthy adult volunteers participated in study; the team swabbed four spots on each person’s cell phone, and eight spots on each person’s right hand. Then they used a technique called mass spectrometry to detect molecules from the samples. They identified as many molecules as possible by comparing them to reference structures in the GNPS database, a crowd sourced mass spectrometry knowledge repository and annotation website developed by researchers. With this information, the researchers developed a personalized lifestyle ‘read-out’. By analyzing the molecules left behind on phones, they could tell if a person is likely female, uses high end cosmetics, dyes her hair, drinks coffee, is being treated for depression…all kinds of things. To develop more precise profiles, researchers said more molecules are needed in the database, particularly for the most common foods people eat, clothing materials and wall paints, among other things.