A Treasure Trove of Undiscovered Life: Raw Sewage
Bubbling Wastewater Kristian Bjornard/Wikimedia Commons Raw sewage is apparently a gold mine for virologists in search of new quarry - it contains thousands of previously unknown virus species, according to a new study. Hopefully this unique finding will justify the nasty task of sifting through sewage for science. Microbiologists at the University of Pittsburgh, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Barcelona have been searching for novel ways to find new viruses. About 3,000 different viruses have been described so far, but this is probably a small fraction of the species that exist, the authors say. In a hunt for new examples, they explored sewage samples from sites in Africa, Europe and North America. They used deep sequencing methods to explore viruses with various types of nucleic acids - single-stranded DNA, double-stranded DNA, positive-sense RNA and double-stranded RNA. This method of metagenomics, studying everything in an entire sample population, had...