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## Background   During the past two decades, advances in sequencing technology have enabled the census of microbial members of many natural ecosystems. More recently, attention is increasingly being paid to the microbial residents of our man-made, built ecosystems, both private (homes) and very public (subways, office buildings, and hospitals.) Here, we contribute to our understanding of the microbial ecology of a singular built environment, the International Space Station (ISS). Developing an understanding of the microbial inhabitants of the "buildings" in which we travel through space will take on increasing importance, as plans for manned human  exploration and colonization of our solar system come to fruition. Project MERCCURI is a collaborative effort of UC Davis (microBEnet), Science Cheerleader, NanoRacks, Space Florida, and Scistarter.com. One component of this project was the collection and microbial analysis (via 16S rDNA PCR) of 15 samples swabbed from surfaces onboard the ISS. ## Methodology/Principal Findings  Sterile swabs were used to sample 15 surfaces onboard the International Space Station. The sites sampled were designed to be analogous to samples collected for 1) the Wildlife of Our Homes project and 2) the cell phone and shoe samples that were concurrently being collected for another component of Project MERCCURI. Sequencing of the 16S rRNA genes amplified from DNA extracted from each swab was used to produce a "census" of the microbes present on each surface sampled.