Scientists Are Vacuuming Animal DNA Out of the Air
AN IMAGINATIVE NEW TECHNOLOGY COULD REVOLUTIONIZE THE STUDY OF BIODIVERSITY AND HELP SAVE ENDANGERED SPECIES.
has a habit of using unconventional means to gather data. She once offered herself as bait to leeches in Madagascar, hoping to find in their guts the genetic traces of the animals they had been feeding on. But Bohmann, an ecologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has recently developed a less medieval method of finding animals: vacuuming their DNA out of the sky.
In late 2021, Bohmann and her colleagues detected dozens of captive animal species at the Copenhagen Zoo, as well as nearby free-roaming creatures like squirrels and cats — even when those animals were outside the zoo’s walls. Essentially, the technique involves vacuuming or blowing air through a filter to extract genetic material for sequencing and analysis.
Unbeknownst to all involved, a separate group of researchers from Queen Mary University of London built their own DNA vacuum back in 2020. After discovering the coincidence of similar research efforts, the teams opted to publish their findings together. The two papers, published in February 2022 in Current Biology, serve as proof of concept for a tool that could revolutionize biodiversity monitoring and improve ecological decision-making. In practice, DNA vacuuming could more effectively map the habitats of threatened and endangered species.“We’ve demonstrated this can work extremely well,” says Elizabeth Clare, a biologist at York University in Toronto, who led the British study. “What we now need to figure out is under what conditions does it work.”
THE AIR AROUND
us is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and, surprisingly, some teeny fraction of a percent DNA. Living creatures are constantly “shedding” bits of their genomes into the environment, through saliva, skin, feces, fur, feathers and more. These are are excellent hints for mapping out an ecosystem’s inhabitants, but the microscopic particles wafting from them could prove even more useful.
Over the past couple of decades, an entire genre of research has sprung up around environmental DNA (eDNA). Whereas human observers and camera traps require a physical animal in the right place at the right time, eDNA “is more like a footprint,” Clare says. “It gets left behind, and it lasts much longer.”
Genetic material has been extracted from rain, soil and even honey. Bodies of water have been especially handy for surveying both aquatic and terrestrial populations. But the burgeoning field has overlooked the stuff we breathe. Air, as a medium for DNA research, is at once appealing and daunting. It’s everywhere, so easy to sample, yet still enigmatic and irregular. At the Hamerton Zoo Park in Cambridgeshire, where she conducted her tests, Clare regularly picked up DNA from enclosures hundreds of yards away. One prolific lemur appeared almost everywhere. But another species of lemur never showed up once, even when she vacuumed right beside it.
Still, judging by her and Bohmann’s expectations, the experiments were wildly successful. At the start, the investigators were all but certain of complete failure. (Both received their funding from high-risk grants for implausible technologies.) Instead, they found a whole menagerie — 49 species in Denmark, and 25 in England, detected in both sealed enclosures and open air. They even detected evidence of fish that were only used as feed for other animals. “It was just mind blowing,” Bohmann says.
The two groups used substantially different methods, which suggests that collecting airborne DNA is much easier than anyone predicted. “This is what the next experiment should be: Can we actually detect animals in the wild?” Clare says. “The answer is: We already did.”
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