The bacteria and viruses that infect us also get passed into raw sewage, and to track disease, Eric Schadt, when he was the chief scientific officer at Pacific Biosciences, wanted to try to sequence wastewater to identify pathogens, Forbes' Matthew Herper reports.
At that time, Herper notes that the implementation was a little unwieldy: bringing samples from the San Francisco sewers back to PacBio sequencers for testing was not really workable.
Schadt, now at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, still wants to develop a sequence-based map of pathogens, and Herper says that the small Oxford Nanopore sequencers could be the answer.