spaced–cadette:

scope-dogg:

tilthat:

TIL that half the DNA on the NYC Subway matches no known organism

via reddit.com

New York is just like that

“The problem, though, is that our genetic libraries are still incomplete. For example, if I don’t know what the DNA sequences of a cockroach look like, how can I know my DNA sequence belongs to a cockroach? That’s how why half the DNA found in the project matched no known organism.

This is especially true when it comes to bacteria that are being discovered for the first time in these new metagenomic analyses. And what does “associated with,” when it comes to bacteria, really mean? Maybe we found a certain bacterium on cheese once, but maybe we never sampled its true native habitat?

Even the best technologies we have now are ultimately crude tools to grope at a vast, unseen world. It maybe be hard to intuit whether it make sense for Acinetobacter or Enterococcus to be on the subway, but the research team found plenty of non-microbial DNA, too, and a lot of it didn’t make sense. According to the WSJ, human DNA was prevalent, as were beetle and fly DNA. Those make sense. (We actually don’t know about cockroaches because their genome hasn’t been sequenced yet.)

The next most prevalent type of DNA, though, was cucumber. Cucumber? “