Scientists Back Off Some Findings in NYC Subway Microbiome Study
Scientists who mapped the DNA of the New York City subway system have backed off a claim that they discovered traces of anthrax and bubonic plague at several stations, after federal and city public health officials strongly disputed the findings.
Upon further analysis, the scientists now say, there is no evidence that those suspect DNA samples belong to any infectious bacteria. “There is no strong evidence to suggest these organisms are in fact present, and no evidence of pathogenicity,” the scientists said in a formal revision last week of their research published in the journal Cell Systems.
“There is definitively not a single shred of genetic evidence that these organisms would actually get you sick,” said geneticist Christopher Mason at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, the senior scientist responsible for the research published in February. He called the mistake “an error of interpretation.”
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In that study, which garnered national headlines, Dr. Mason and his colleagues collected 1,427 genetic samples from 466 stations throughout the subway system, encompassing more than 10 billion DNA fragments. Half matched no known organisms. In their analysis, they did identify 15,152 types of life-forms, including anthrax and the plague bacillus at a handful of locations.
Infectious disease experts at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sharply disagreed with the anthrax and plague findings, calling that aspect of the DNA subway survey “a flawed interpretation of the findings.”
In a letter to the journal challenging the results, they called the suggestion that plague and anthrax bacteria were found in the subways “speculative, sensationalist, and headline-grabbing.”
The Cornell researchers said the flaw in their conclusions was only a small part of their broader findings.
“This is not a retraction,” said Dr. Mason. “There was no fault found by the editors or the journal or other scientists in the way the data was gathered and analyzed. It was explicitly a problem of interpretation.”
Write to Robert Lee Hotz at [email protected]
Corrections & Amplifications:
“There is definitively not a single shred of genetic evidence that these organisms would actually get you sick,” said geneticist Christopher Mason at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, the senior scientist responsible for the research published in February. An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the medical college.
Source: Wall Street Journal Health
