© ROZ CHAST/THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION/WWW.CARTOONBANK.COMWhen Weill Cornell Medical College genomicist Chris Mason would drop his 6-month-old daughter off at day care in 2011, he’d encounter more than a room filled with active toddlers. He’d step into a microbial nightmare. “Seeing how they all shared toys and put them in their mouths, I wanted to swab everything before and after,” he recalls.
Mason learned that there was an ongoing day-care microbiome project, led by researchers at Drexel University and Brooklyn College. But he didn’t necessarily want to study just the day care’s microbiome. Rather, the experience sparked a bigger idea: Mason wondered if he could explore the bacterial microbiome of New York City.
Last summer, Mason led a team of five NYC undergraduate students in the collection of more than 1,400 samples: three from each of the city’s 468 subway stations. “We did swabs of the kiosks, the turnstiles, and then trains at each one of the stations,” Mason says. “They pretty much just went and swabbed every day all day for about a month and a half.” For each sample collected, the students took a photo ...
