Tuesday, June 03, 2025

DNA floating in the air tracks wildlife, viruses — even drugs

University of Florida

DNA collection — image:
Air eDNA is vacuumed up from a Florida forest using simple laboratory equipment and an air filter.
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Credit: David Duffy

Dublin is known as a city where you can enjoy a few pints of Guiness, get a warm welcome from the locals and hear lively traditional music drifting out of pubs and into the city air.

But it’s not just music floating on the breeze. The air of Dublin also contains cannabis, poppy, even magic mushrooms — at least their DNA.

That’s according to a new study that reveals the power of DNA, vacuumed up from the air, which can track everything from elusive bobcats to illicit drugs.

“The level of information that’s available in environmental DNA is such that we’re only starting to consider what the potential applications can be, from humans, to wildlife to other species that have implications for human health,” said David Duffy, Ph.D., a professor of wildlife disease genomics at the University of Florida and lead author of a new study showing the widespread utility of DNA vacuumed from the air.

Housed at UF’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, Duffy’s lab developed new methods for deciphering environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, to study sea turtle genetics. They’ve expanded the tools to study every species — including humans — from DNA captured in environmental samples like water, soil and sand.

But these errant strands of DNA do not just settle into muddy soil or flow along rivers. The air itself is infused with genetic material. A simple air filter running for hours, days or weeks can pick up signs of nearly every species that grows or wanders nearby.

“When we started, it seemed like it would be hard to get intact large fragments of DNA from the air. But that’s not the case. We’re actually finding a lot of informative DNA,” Duffy said. “That means you can study species without directly having to disturb them, without ever having to see them. It opens up huge possibilities to study all the species in an area simultaneously, from microbes and viruses all the way up to vertebrates like bobcats and humans, and everything in between.”

As a proof of concept, the researchers showed that they could pick up signs of hundreds of different human pathogens from the Dublin air, including viruses and bacteria. Such surveillance could help scientists track emerging diseases. The same method can track common allergens, like peanut or pollen, more precisely than is currently possible, the scientists discovered.

In another test of the power of eDNA, Duffy’s lab was also able to identify the origin of bobcats and spiders whose DNA was hoovered up from air in a Florida forest. With little more than an air filter, scientists could track endangered species and identify where they came from, all without having to lay eyes on skittish animals or root around forest floors for scat samples. When trying to save and conserve wildlife, knowing where an animal originates from can be as important as knowing where it currently is.

This powerful analysis was paired with impressive speed and efficiency. The team demonstrated that a single researcher could process DNA for every species in as little as a day using compact, affordable equipment, and software hosted in the cloud. That quick turnaround is orders of magnitude faster than would have been possible just a few years ago and opens up advanced environmental studies to more scientists around the world. The same tools can potentially identify sensitive human genetic data, which is why Duffy and his collaborators have called for ethical guardrails for the rapidly developing field of eDNA.

“It seems like science fiction, but it’s becoming science fact,” Duffy said. “The technology is finally matching the scale of environmental problems.”

Journal

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-025-02711-w

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Shotgun sequencing of airborne eDNA achieves rapid assessment of whole biomes, population genetics and genomic variation

Article Publication Date

3-Jun-2025

Air eDNA is vacuumed up from a Florida forest using simple laboratory equipment and an air filter.

Air eDNA is vacuumed up from Dublin using simple laboratory equipment and an air filter.

Vials attached to a car help collect air eDNA on the go.

Credit

David Duffy

Online game, developed at Harvard, proven to reduce partisan animosity

Harvard University

Algorithmically-driven social media has split red and blue America into separate information environments. But a new online tool, developed at Harvard, can bring citizens back together.

The virtual quiz game Tango pairs Democrats and Republicans on common teams, where bipartisanship quickly emerges as their competitive superpower. “It’s really the opposite of the nasty, divisive posting you find on social media,” offered Tango co-creator Joshua D. Greene, a professor of psychology and co-author of new study measuring the game’s impact.

The results, published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, showed decreased negative partisanship with increased warmth and even financial generosity between nearly 5,000 U.S. players from opposing political parties. The effect was comparable, the researchers wrote, to rolling back approximately 15 years of rising polarization in American political life.

In one of the experiments, Democrats and Republicans were given $100 to allot as they like. Those who had teamed up with a political rival proved far more generous with members of the opposing party. What’s more, the changes proved long-lasting across all five experiments after just one hour of gameplay.

“We see over and over again that the effects last at least a month and often up to four months from playing just once,” reported Greene, author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”(2013).

The experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher has spent the last several years studying mutually beneficial cooperation, a core principle in both the life- and social sciences. “At every single level,” he explained, “the reason the world isn’t just primordial soup is because parts can come together to form wholes that can accomplish more together than they can separately.”

Also involved in the project is psychology Ph.D. candidate Lucas Woodley ’23, lead author on the new paper. As a Harvard undergraduate, he co-authored a book on negotiation, featuring a free hands-on curriculum for faculty and students. Its exercises proved fun and effective, but Woodley was left searching for more scalable interventions.

With the help of the Washington, D.C.-based Global Development Incubator, the Tango project team engineered a platform that presents players across the U.S. with three rounds of trivia. Some questions cover cultural terrain, advantaging either Democrats (think: who are the main characters from “Stranger Things” on Netflix?) or Republicans (see: name the family from “Duck Dynasty”).

Other questions are crafted to affirm or challenge partisan beliefs. For example, Americans on the left are more likely to know that immigrants in the U.S. commit relatively few crimes. Right-leaning players know relatively few gun deaths involve assault-style weapons.

“We build in uncomfortable truths for both sides,” Woodley explained. “People still left us comments saying they want to play again.”

All this while, two-person teams rely on Tango’s chat function to coordinate answers. As Woodley pointed out, this invites debate as well as mini celebrations of a partner’s contributions. “That seems to be what makes the game so effective,” he offered.

Eventually, the Tango team hopes for regularly scheduled sessions where Americans at large can join in for game night at letstango.org. Woodley envisions bargoers encountering Tango at their local watering hole. But for now, they’ve cooked up other creative ways of distributing a game that requires simultaneity.

The game has already reached thousands of U.S. undergraduates via rollouts at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, University of Missouri, and more. The team recently wrapped up its first trial with employees at a Fortune 500 company. And as polarization surges globally, Tango is also being customized for a variety of national contexts. Pilot testing is currently underway in Israel, with questions for India and Northern Ireland in the works.