Thursday, July 30, 2009

Couldn't help but laugh at this ,metagenome project

I would have thought this to be an April's Fool prank, except I came across the dataset while browsing the NCBI Short Read Archive. It did have me laughing out loud.

Metagenomic Analysis with Galaxy: Windshield Genomics and Beyond
And in case one thought the title was jargon or a brand name

...we asked the following
questions: “When I drive through Pennsylvania in June my windshield
gets quite dirty with all these bugs. Yet do I know what they are?
How many beetles versus butterflies? Is there a difference between
day and night? Is there a difference between Pennsylvania and
Connecticut?” So we scraped the windshield, isolated genomic DNA,
and subjected it to 454 FLX sequencing. We then uploaded the data
into Galaxy and attempted answering these questions. In the end
Pennsylvania turned out to be different from Connecticut.


Gotta admit some jealousy -- I wish I had this much access to a second-gen sequencer that I could do such a whimsical project!

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