To all of the microbial researchers out there, be careful about contaminants in your cultures, reagents, and equipment! Yes, we all are careful about good techniques and having proper controls. However, this article suggested that perhaps contaminants are surfacing much more in microbial related literature than we thought. This concept isn’t new, and the aforementioned article provides a good summary of the common culprits. Also, this article had a shoutout to Jonathan at the very end: “Apologies in advance to Jonathan Eisen for “contaminomics”. Don’t hit me.”
Katie Dahlhausen (@PhDKD) is a PhD student in Jonathan Eisen’s lab and is interested in the biogeography and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance
I’m curious if there were any contaminants in their sequencing reagents? It appears that they did not run a sequencing blank, unless I’m mistaken?
Not sure – you might want to look at the thread in the Ed Yong blog post which has some interesting comments.
Nothing there, I’ll repost on his article. Thanks.