Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College have spent the last 18 months scouring the New York Subway in the search for a DNA profile of the system. They even created a map of the 15,152 microbes they found.
If you think of New York City as a place where anything can happen, you probably weren't thinking that contracting Bubonic Plague from a handrail at a subway stop as one of them. But researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College recently set out to map the kind of microbes they found in the New York Subway as part of an intensive research project combining "big data," public health, and public transit.
Robert Lee Holtz reports on the project for the Wall Street Journal (which means there might be a paywall blocking access to the story): "The big-data project, the first genetic profile of a metropolitan transit system, is in many ways 'a mirror of the people themselves who ride the subway,' said Dr. Mason, a geneticist at the Weill Cornell Medical College."
Meghan Holohan also covers the study for NBC News. According to Holohan, "Weill Cornell researchers attempted to identify all 15,152 microbes for a PathoMap, which could be used to track infectious disease outbreaks."
Andrew M. Seaman also covered the story for Reuters.
Lastly, Science Daily also has an abstract detailing the methodology and some of the findings of the study.
Read the full story: Map of New York City subway system microbes; Drug resistant bacteria, DNA fragments linked to anthrax, Bubonic plague
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