Check out the post at Suicyte Notes on the discovery of a very very small novel primate from analyzing metagenomic data. Man, metagenomics rocks.
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
——–
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Author: Jonathan Eisen
I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen
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Um, I’m pretty sure this is a spoof, to highlight the risks of contamination in sample handling for metagenomics. Microscopic sea monkeys – oh, were it really true!
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I can reassure you that you are right. Something tells me that Jonathan might have figured this out, too.
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Well, it is a satire of sorts. But he did find some unusual sequences in the GOS data. So it is not quite a spoof.
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Definitely amusing (would be more so if the humor didn’t hit so close to home) and its good to make it clear that data is rarely (if ever?) perfect as I think Jonathan Eisen stated quite eloquently in the source blog. On the positive side, the paper(s) don’t claim that any effort was made to remove “suspect” sequences so you get what you get, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thats the raw data. I trust that the numbers are trivial enough as to not bias any of the conclusions.
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