With New York City restaurants, bodegas, and school cafeterias as his field sites, a dining-room table as his wet lab, and three high school students as collaborators, genomicist Mark Stoeckle has taken do-it-yourself science to a new level. Research headquarters are Stoeckle’s Upper West Side apartment, where he’s laid out pipettes, a thermocycler, and a gel reader in the spots usually reserved for a centerpiece and dinner plates.
For the past several years, Stoeckle, a physician and an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller University, has been using DNA barcoding to lead students on a genetic journey through the urban environment. Barcoding, a DNA sequencing approach devised about 10 years ago, aims to easily identify scores of animal and plant species based on a quick read of characteristically variable gene sequences.
With high schoolers from Trinity School, a private school not far from his home, Stoeckle has made some interesting discoveries: ...
