Microbes are colonizing the supermarket cleaning aisle

A bottle of bacterial spores is not what you’d expect to find in the home care aisle of your local supermarket. But live microbes are the hot ingredient in the cleaning product industry right now. Of course, microbes are in us, on us, and around us—our constant microscopic companions. Without them we become malnourished and sickly. Outside our bodies, they do all sorts of useful chemical work. Lactic acid bacteria turn milk into yogurt, complex microbial consortia in wastewater treatment plants clean up humanity’s most repulsive messes, and precision fermentation is often cited as the next frontier in specialty chemical production. Home care, though, is a new place for microbes to bloom ... read on at C&EN's website: