Really nice article from Sarah Zhang at Gizmodo “Not Even Science Could Explain the Bacteria In My Apartment“. In it, she discusses the results of her participation in the Wildlife of Our Home study, the NY metagenomic data, and the fact that we’re still in the “exploration” phase of DNA-based microbial ecology.
I think it’s great to see an emphasis on what we don’t know… since in this field what we don’t know vastly exceeds what we do know.
Excellent post! And she has not even commented on the uncertainty about which microbes are viable, or even real in her dataset. Thanks for giving us a dose of common sense. As Christopher Mason has mentioned in this blog, “just because you have data, it takes some processing (…) to become wisdom”.