Talking about DNA sequencing from THE AIR #shorts

Let's talk about a recent paper that came out in PeerJ where scientists sequence DNA of mammalian species from the air, while I transfer my stocks.

Paper:
Clare EL, Economou CK, Faulkes CG, Gilbert JD, Bennett F, Drinkwater R, Littlefair JE. 2021. eDNAir: proof of concept that animal DNA can be collected from air sampling. PeerJ 9:e11030 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11030

Script:
Saw in my news feed that scientists have found a way to sequence mammalian DNA FROM THE AIR. What the what now?!? So of course, I go find the specific paper to see what this actually looks like and what its capable of. In the paper they threw around words like biosurveillance and biomonitoring like it’s not the scariest thing since Anthrax, but they’re mostly thinking along the lines of monitoring biodiversity. So environmental DNA or eDNA is fairly common. Scientists have been reading eDNA from aquatic systems for some time, and there’s interest in eDNA left in the air from plants, fungi and even viruses. However, mammals also leave behind eDNA from their skin and saliva, soooo they tested if you can read DNA from the air from mammals. They specifically captured air from an artificial burrow of naked mole rats as well as the room the colony was housed in since staff frequented the room to take care of these sand puppies. They measured miDNA since there tends to be a lot of copies of it in every cell and its is species specific, and yes, they were able to sequence DNA from the air and isolate naked mole rat and human specific DNA. They can’t tell you any individual specifics from that DNA, but they propose in the future this could be used for mammalian biodiversity as well as human forensic studies. There are quite a few hurdles before that, like getting unique genetic DNA, DNA dilution seen in large spaces, and DNA contamination which they saw quite a bit of. Soooo no human biomonitoring for a while, thank gawd!

Видео Talking about DNA sequencing from THE AIR #shorts канала RealizingResearch