PERSONAL CAR AS A SUBJECT OF MICROBIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Abstract
A personal car is a compact, mobile built environment where humans spend hours each week in close contact with air, textiles, plastics, and high touch surfaces. This makes the car interior a useful, and often underestimated, object of microbiological research. Unlike many indoor spaces, a car repeatedly alternates between outdoor and indoor conditions, experiences strong temperature and humidity swings, receives a continuous influx of dust and particles from roads, and accumulates human associated microbes from drivers and passengers. Modern microbiology treats the car cabin not as a sterile box but as an ecological system shaped by occupancy, ventilation and filtration, surface materials, cleaning routines, seasonality, and driving patterns.