Citizen (Funded) Science

As evidenced by the buzz around the Citizen Science session at ASM yesterday, microbial ecologists are increasingly looking for ways to engage “Citizen Scientists” to participate in large-scale projects, often by crowd-sourcing sample collection. This concept is not new; in fact, citizen scientists have been counting birds every year for over 100 years!

A recent price drop in high-throughput sequencing technology has enabled the ginormous scale of current citizen science projects. Anyone who is interested can participate by swabbing their homes or their poop! This same price drop also enables a different sort of citizen scientist. This sort of citizen scientist is not tied to any pre-existing project, but is free to imagine his own. If he can convince the right person that his project is interesting, he can fund it himself with relatively little cash.

Dan Prater is exactly this sort of citizen scientist! He was curious about the microbial succession taking place in the compost tea that he was brewing on his family’s organic farm in Indiana. So, he asked Jonathan Eisen to help him figure it out! Dan collected a time series of samples from two different batches of compost tea. He shipped the samples to UC Davis, and I prepared 16S rRNA PCR libraries from them. We went from sample collection, through a MiSeq run, to a poster at ASM (with data) in a month! <sound of my horn tooting>

If you are at ASM, you can check out this poster tomorrow, Tuesday, May 21 from 1:00-2:45pm! It’s poster #2402, entitled Phylogenetic Analysis of and Actively Aerated Compost Tea.