These represent organisms that New Yorkers touch every day, but were uncharacterized and undiscovered until this study. Strikingly, about half of the sequences of DNA they collected could not be identified - they did not match any organism known to the National Center for Biotechnology Information or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Culture experiments revealed that all subway sites tested possess live bacteria. The majority of the 637 known bacterial, viral, fungal and animal species he and his co-authors detected were non-pathogenic and represent normal bacteria present on human skin and human body. The PathoMap findings are generally reassuring, indicating no need to avoid the subway system or use protective gloves, Dr. Mason, an assistant professor in Weill Cornell's Department of Physiology and Biophysics and in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine (ICB). It is a baseline assessment, and repeated sampling could be used for long-term, accurate disease surveillance, bioterrorism threat mitigation, and large scale health management for New York, says the study's senior investigator, Dr.
The study, published in Cell Systems, demonstrates that it is possible and useful to develop a "pathogen map" - dubbed a "PathoMap" - of a city, with the heavily traveled subway a proxy for New York's population.
Infographic showing the relative amount of DNA found in the New York subway system form bacteria associated with the human body.
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