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Either Way, We Don't Want It in Our Apartments

Dec 30, 2009

Two New York City high school students took to the streets to collect more than 200 samples, including hair from classmates, food, and cockroaches, to examine their DNA barcodes, reports NPR's health blog Shot. Brenda Tan and Matt Cost confirmed that their classmates were human (shucks) and identified some mislabeled food. They might have, though, identified a new species of cockroach. That roach, collected from an Upper West Side apartment, varied from the roaches in the Barcode of Life Database by about four percent and most species vary by one percent or less.

Breaking News
The Scan

Comfort of Home

The Guardian reports that AstraZeneca is to run more clinical trials from people's homes with the aim of increasing participant diversity.

Keep Under Control

Genetic technologies are among the tools suggested to manage invasive species and feral animals in Australia, Newsweek says.

Just Make It

The New York Times writes that there is increased interest in applying gene synthesis to even more applications.

Nucleic Acids Research Papers on OncoDB, mBodyMap, Genomicus

In Nucleic Acids Research this week: database to analyze large cancer datasets, human body microbe database, and more.