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Are the Bugs Smashed on the Grill the Same?

Jul 31, 2009

On his blog, Keith Robison points out a dataset he found in the NCBI Short Read Archive that got him laughing. The study, from Penn State's Anton Nekrutenko, looked into "windshield genomics," or asked these 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?

Nekrutenko and his colleagues scraped bugs off windshield and sequenced them — there was indeed a difference between the bugs in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Robison adds, "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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