connecting
Looking for life that doesn't fit the tree.
Every known microbe belongs to a phylum, one of the big branches of the tree of life. We search public DNA from deep groundwater, seafloor mud and hot springs for organisms that don't belong to any of them.
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Starting up…
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Results
Newest results on top. Each sample gets a score for how strongly it holds one real organism that no known phylum fits. Anything scoring 10 or more is a phylum candidate.
Waiting for the first samples to finish…
10+ phylum candidate5–10 look closer2–5 weak signalunder 2 nothing new
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How we get there
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What we've learned
- Old, famous samples are already picked clean16 hand-picked samples came back empty. Their mystery microbes were described in the years since.
- Sunlight means fake signalsAlgae carry chloroplasts, ex-bacteria living inside them, and those fool the scan. Now we only search places with no light.
- One read isn't a signalA real organism shows up in many different genes at the same strength. Scattered single hits are noise.
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The details
The global scan of public DNA
Earlier batches
Look inside the raw files
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On the Mac: ~/Documents/phylum-hunt/
Server and Mac logs
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