sciatrix

oh, hdu not do tons of research for my off-the-cuff grading nonsense post. :P Metabarcoding is a technique you can use to identify a whole lot of species from one sample; basically, you amplify and sequence a place on the genome that is really well conserved, such that a single species is all just the same. These days, we can sequence a whole mix of things and know we're sequencing the same piece of DNA using microbeads tied to plates to tether them in place. So you can get a mixture of lots of sequences for this place in the genome, and you can check each sequence against the known sequences for nearly every species on earth to find out what was in the sample. It's particularly useful for conservation or dietary studies--you can run a metabarcoding assay on a fecal sample and find out all the animals that went into it, not to mention the identity of the animal that left it--and also for microbiomes, where you take a swab of the surface you're interested in, amplify it if you can, and then run that.

So probably not the cell phone while cooking thing, but it could tell you what kinds of bacteria are living on your phone.

I too hoped that student was going places! I love that kind of enthusiasm.