The results of a massive fresh desoxyribonucleic acid sequencing task on the New York City subway havejust been release . And yup , there ’s a lot of bacteria on the subway — though we know most of it is harmless . What ’s really important , though , is what we do n’t have it off about it .
ThePathoMapproject , which involved try turnstiles , benches , and keypads at 466 stations , institute 15,152 life - forms in total , one-half of which were bacterial . The Wall Street Journal has create afun , interactive microbial map of the subwayout of the data , evince where on the lines the bacteria “ affiliate with ” everything from mozzarella tall mallow to staph infections was found .
But “ associate with ” is a pretty fuzzy terminus that run up against the limits of science . In the past few old age , genetical sequencing has become vastly more muscular and cheap , attain metagenomic analyses possible . This imply we can take all of the desoxyribonucleic acid in an environmental sample distribution — human , flora , bacterium , cockroach , whatever — and sequence the hell out of it .
The problem , though , is that our genetic libraries are still incomplete . For example , if I do n’t know what the DNA sequences of a cockroach look like , how can I recognise my DNA sequence belongs to a roach ? That ’s how why half the desoxyribonucleic acid come up in the project equal no known organism .
This is especially straight when it comes to bacteria that are being discovered for the first time in these raw metagenomic depth psychology . And what does “ associated with , ” when it comes to bacterium , really mean ? perchance we establish a sure bacterium on cheeseflower once , but possibly we never sampled its on-key native home ground ?
Even the best engineering we have now are ultimately crude puppet to grope at a vast , unseen world . It maybe be surd to intuit whether it make sense for Acinetobacter or Enterococcus to be on the metro , but the research squad happen plenty of non - microbial deoxyribonucleic acid , too , and a lot of it did n’t make sense . According to the WSJ , human DNA was prevalent , as were beetle and flee DNA . Those make sensory faculty . ( We in reality do n’t acknowledge about cockroach because their genome has n’t been sequenced yet . )
The next most predominant type of DNA , though , was cuke . Cucumber ? When was the last sentence you saw someone erode on a Cucumis sativus on the metro ? More likely , the data processor program grouped all plant textile under cucumber .
And then there were the straight up weird one , concord to the WSJ .
Initial database searches with underpass DNA , for case , turned up false match to the Tasmanian daemon , the Himalayan yak and the Mediterranean fruit rainfly — all creatures highly unlikely to be find in a New York transit organisation .
That ’s why some of the microbic DNA found that sound alarming — anthrax , for example — is no rationality to be calling Homeland Security just yet .
None of this detracts , of course of instruction , from how implausibly interesting urban microbiology really is . The metropolis is an being , and we ’re slowly begin to understand its microbiome . Studying how bacterium — be they pathogens or scavengers or plainly harmless microbes — spread through the urban surround could yield young insights into how a metropolis work .
I ’m just impatiently waiting for the future , when we ’re beyond the simple-minded cataloguing of microbes , to truly interpret how they live and operate together . [ WSJ , Cell Systems ]
Top figure of speech : Alessandro Colle / shutterstock
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