As she walks into her microbiology laboratory at Oregon State University, Kate Field hands her graduate student a Ziploc bag full of tubes of fecal samples. "These are just in from New Zealand," she says with a smile. For just being handed what essentially amounts to a bag of poop, her graduate student seems pretty excited as well. Now, the student's job is to test whether the genetic markers Field has developed can reliably identify what type of animal produced the sample. "Right now they're working pretty well," Field says.
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