Microbiome of cotton towels used in daily life

To reveal microbiota of towels used in daily life, a 6-month longitudinal test was conduved. New cotton towels were distributed to 26 households. The towels were collected every two months from the start of use, including towels that were used as usual for wiping face, hands, and body (used towels) and towels that were not used but only washed together with the used towels. A 1 cm square piece of the towels were used for DNA extraction.The extracted DNAs were used to amplify V3-V4 region of 16S rRNA gene, and were sequenced using the MiSeq 300x2 nt paired-end platform.