Lying about your age might not do you any good if your microbiome gives you away. New research in the journal mSystems lays out how the crowds of bacteria teeming on and in our bodies change as we get older. The researchers found that skin microbes, in particular, change so consistently over time that a sample of them can be used to predict someone’s age within about four years.

For now, the correlation is a fun tool. But down the line, whether someone’s microbiome actually aligns with their real age might be useful when it comes to assessing their overall health, says study co-author Shi Huang, an engineer at the University of California, San Diego. “Our assumption is that if age is a key driver of certain disease, then the [microbiome] markers we can ID here can indicate diseases,” he says.

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Published by Discover, February 11, 2020