[ad_1]
Some 15,000 life forms were detected in DNA samples taken from turnstiles, keyboards and seats at 466 New York subway stations. This is largely what you expected: mozzarella, white flies, staphylococcus and anthrax. Then there are weird things: the Tasmanian devil, the Himalayan yak and the Mediterranean fly.
But this represents only half of the DNA collected and sequenced in the recent study of the subterranean biome of the metropolis (habitat).
The other half is, well … unknown.
Is the New York subway the closest thing to earth to the primordial pebble that triggered life on this planet?
Or is it the preferred mode of ground transportation for extraterrestrials (the UN is based in New York, after all)?
the the Wall Street newspapercompiled the results of the New York subway network study by the PathoMap project in an interactive map.
Yes, there is a flourishing metropolis of bacteria there.
And he even divided into communities.
Everything has been made possible by the speed and ease with which DNA analysis can be conducted. It is not necessary for samples to be large – simple scraping will suffice. Your average laboratory can do the sequencing.
SUPERHUMAN: Building Better Microbes to Overload Soldiers
"We know almost nothing about the ecology of urban environments," said evolutionist biologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis, the Wall Street newspaper. "How will we know if there is something wrong if we do not know what is normal?"
And if you want to find something, a metro used by 5.5 million commuters each day is where you will find it.
They found more than 10 billion fragments of biochemical code and passed through a supercomputer.
The only problem was the known DNA library to which it corresponded.
So no. Unknown DNA is probably not our evolutionary future. Neither are the Illuminati, Daleks, Cloverfields – or any other form of extraterrestrial life that has invaded New York on our screens.
We have just started to map the DNA of all life in the world. The digital shelves of this library are still largely bare.
So, when a result matches "no known life form," that's exactly what it means.
It just has not been identified and cataloged yet.
Humans. The straws Coleoptera
The DNA of all the above has been found in abundance.
But not cockroaches.
This is because they have not been fully sequenced yet.
And why did the test throw Tasmanian devils and yaks from the Himalayas – both unlikely to use the New York subway?
Because DNA fragments can be similar between species. And an incomplete catalog will only throw what he knows.
That is why PathoMap later retracted itself by claiming to have found anthrax and bubonic plague in the subway system: it attributed an interpretation error to a misdiagnosis.
The study has a serious side.
It looks at the potentially dangerous (disease-carrying) bacteria that thrive beneath the streets of the city, where they come from and how they are implanted there.
It is sown by bacteria on food that commuters eat, pets and plants they keep, carried by their shoes and clothes, and left behind by their garbage, sofas and unwashed hands.
More than half of the identified bacteria were from the human gastrointestinal and urogenital tract (feces). About a third was the most harmless substance that lives on our skin. Most of the rest was associated with coughing or sneezing.
The scientists pointed out that the levels of bacteria detected in the metro did not pose any public health problem.
But the list of species of bacteria that they found in the 466 stations of New York is revealing:
– 220 stations had traces of bacteria resistant to antibiotics
– 215 had toxic bacteria for food
– 192 urinary tract infections
– 151 had traces of mozzarella cheese
– 66 had meningitis and dejection
– 60 had skipped
– 37 were carriers of staphylococcal infections
Source link
