Next Generation Sequencing

Via GenomeWeb, I had quite a laugh at Keith Robinson’s recent blog post on Metagenomic Analysis with Galaxy: Windshield Genomics and Beyond - a dataset he came across while browsing the NCBI Short Read Archive, with the following abstract:

When I drive through Pennsylvania in June my windshield gets quite dirty with all these bugs. Yet do I know what they are? How many beetles versus butterflies? Is there a difference between day and night? Is there a difference between Pennsylvania and Connecticut? So we scraped the windshield, isolated genomic DNA, and subjected it to 454 FLX sequencing. We then uploaded the data into Galaxy and attempted answering these questions. In the end Pennsylvania turned out to be different from Connecticut.

It’s certainly an alternative use of high-throughput sequencing capacity at this point, but a fun one!

On a related note I might add that I would like to read a physics article on windshield dynamics, as I - through ongoing empirical observations - experience a dramatical increase in the number of bugs squashed on my windshield if my average commuting speed is raised by around 10%…