Listening to this podcast this morning reminded me that we hadn’t yet made a plug for Rob Dunn’s awesome citizen science project “Domestic Biomes: The Wild Life of Your Home”. This project is collecting samples of people’s homes (and the people themselves) from all across the country, in both urban and rural environments. The samples will be analyzed (presumably by rRNA sequencing?) and people will get a report on how their microbes match up to others in different environment.
It’s an awesome project, I don’t know if they’re still looking for volunteers but the website doesn’t say otherwise so I’ll assume they are.
We are definitely still looking for volunteers. We need your toilet seats, cutting boards, tv screens and other household bits and pieces. The first sample is now in and the results are absolutely crazy. The next seventy houses (all from NC) will be run next and then we will begin to send out kits nationally. Sign up and you can learn just who, or at least what, you have been sleeping and eating with all these years.