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Dr. Christopher Mason/Provided
Left: Heba Shabaan, a third-year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College and Dr. Christopher Mason prepare to swab for microbes in the NYC subway system on June 21, 2020. Right: Subway turnstile being swabbed. Weill Cornell study: New species are all around us
May 27, 2021
About 12,000 bacteria and viruses collected in a sampling from public transit systems and hospitals around the world from 2015 to 2017 had never before been identified, according to a study by the International MetaSUB Consortium, a global effort at tracking microbes that is led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.
For the study, published May 26 in Cell, international investigators collected nearly 5,000 samples over a three-year period across 60 cities in 32 countries and six continents. The investigators analyzed the samples using a genomic sequencing technique called shotgun sequencing to detect the presence of various microbes, including bacteria, a