Indian currency notes harbour antibiotic-resistant genes

Currency notes, one of the most commonly exchanged objects, are known to harbour disease-causing microbes. Now, a group of Indian scientists has found antibiotic resistant-genes along with bacteria and viruses in rupee notes, giving the phrase dirty money a potential health twist.

This team of scientists, from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, studied rupee notes using—possibly for the first time—a shotgun metagenome sequencing approach. This method employs a relatively new analytics and sequencing approach with complex data to identify microbes in a sample.

The scientists found 78 pathogens and 18 antibiotic resistant-genes in the samples they tested.