Humans shed genetic information everywhere they go

In the geneticIDDNADNADNADNADNADNA age, ecologists’ jobs are made much easier by two things. One is that every organism carries its own chemical identity card, in the form of its genome. The second is that they drop these cards everywhere they go. Urine, bits of fur stuck to a hedge, even shed skin cells: all deposit into the environment. Cheap gene sequencing allows scientists to harvest this “environmental ” (e) from soil, sand, water and the like, and use it to keep track of which species are living where.“Every organism,” of course, includes humans. In a paper published on May 15th in , a group of researchers from America and Europe report that such e surveys pick up large quantities of human too. That can be read—and potentially matched with individuals—by anyone with the right equipment.