 Brenda Tan and Matt Cost via Rockefeller Univ. | |
| A cockroach found during a DNA barcoding survey may represent a new species or subspecies. |
When high-school students did an inventory of the DNA in their own homes, they were amazed to find lots of mislabeled food products, a pesky invasive species … and what appears to be a new breed of cockroach.
“The idea was to explore our environment through the lens of DNA,” Matt Cost, an 18-year-old senior at Manhattan’s Trinity School, told me. The experiment turned up more than 150 usable DNA fingerprints, found in common items ranging from apartment-building bugs to a feather duster.
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