One thing that might affect indoor microbes is exposure to light. Light can cause chemical reactions within microbes that harm their DNA or the proteins they need to survive and function. A research team at the Biology and the Built Environment Center wanted to perform an experiment to discover how bacteria living in dust would be affected when they were exposed to light. Which types of bacteria would live and which types would die? Understanding how different kinds of microbes are affected in different environments can help us to create buildings that help people stay healthy, or at least do not make us sick as often.
From what was already known about the way light affects bacteria, we came up with a hypothesis before starting our experiments. We hypothesized that: (1) light would kill some of the bacteria living in dust; (2) different types of light would affect bacterial species differently; and (3) bacterial species that are related would be affected by light in similar ways.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00148