Half The DNA On The NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism 

Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism

The results of a massive new DNA sequencing project on the New York City subway have just been published. 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 don't know about it.


But "associated with" is a pretty fuzzy term that runs up against the limits of science. In the past few years, genetic sequencing has become vastly more powerful and cheap, making metagenomic analyses possible. This means we can take all of the DNA in an environmental sample — human, plant, bacteria, cockroach, whatever — and sequencing the hell out of it.

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.




And then there were the straight up weird ones, according to the WSJ.



None of this detracts, of course, from how incredibly interesting urban microbiology really is. The city is an organism, and we're slowly beginning to understand its microbiome. Studying how bacteria — be they pathogens or scavengers or simply harmless microbes — spread through the urban environment could yield new insights into how a city works.

I'm just impatiently waiting for the future, when we're beyond the simple cataloguing of microbes, to truly understanding how they live and function together. [WSJ, Cell Systems]

Picture: Alessandro Colle/Shutterstock

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