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Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/17/nature_paper_trump_poo/A pair of boffins are in hot water after the image of president Donald Trump made an unexpected cameo in a paper on how to gather animal DNA from their poop at scale.
The paper, which was published in Nature Scientific Reports, discusses the difficulties of gaining high-quality DNA samples from wild animals in a non-invasive way.
Feces is the obvious option, but it is dominated by DNA from other organisms, such as bacteria – so the authors proposed a way to enrich the desired animal's DNA from the sample.
However, the pair also buried an Easter egg in a figure depicting the method, which shows a baboon sitting next to an average-sized turd. And on that turd, is a tiny image of the leader of the free world.
The paper, which was published in Nature Scientific Reports, discusses the difficulties of gaining high-quality DNA samples from wild animals in a non-invasive way.
Feces is the obvious option, but it is dominated by DNA from other organisms, such as bacteria – so the authors proposed a way to enrich the desired animal's DNA from the sample.
However, the pair also buried an Easter egg in a figure depicting the method, which shows a baboon sitting next to an average-sized turd. And on that turd, is a tiny image of the leader of the free world.
For those of you that can get twits,
Link to tweet
And the actual paper from Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20427-9
(Methylation-based enrichment facilitates low-cost, noninvasive genomic scale sequencing of populations from feces)
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