Human And Bacterial Diversity With City Scale Metagenomics...

In a 2015 article, â€Å"Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics† by Ebrahim Afshinnekoo, Cem Meydan, Shawn Levy, and Christopher E. Mason, they discussed how hundreds of species of bacteria and DNA are present in the subway, but most of them were either harmless or unknown. Studies were conducted in the metropolitan area of New York City, because it was an ideal place to undertake a large-scale metagenomic study and it is the largest and densest in terms of population, in the United States. The conducted study consisted of 1,457 collected samples, all across the entire NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority open subway stations, (466 stations) and 24 subway lines. The Staten Island Railway, 12 sites in the Gowanus Canal, four public parks, and one closed subway station that was submerged during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy were also included in the collected sample. In the summer of 2013, three samples were collected from each subway statio n. Two from the station, from areas such as: the station benches, garbage cans, rails and one from inside the train. There were additional samples taken for culturing and testing. The researchers used shot-gun sequencing which is a technique that uses smaller fragments of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences that are reassembled into one sequence by looking for regions of overlap. All of the 3.6M reads, were first trimmed for 99% accuracy for all known organisms then characterized with Sequence-based