Tuesday 11 July 2017
WHAT might be found lurking among the great unwashed at one of the UK’s leading music festivals?
Well, scientists from the University of Salford are about to
find out by joining The 1975, Mumford & Sons and Fleet Foxes at Latitude
this week (July 13-16).
Microbiologists Drs Joe Latimer, Sarah Withers and Ian Goodhead
are the first to sequence bacterial DNA at a UK festival, swabbing fans and offering
them analyses of the range of bugs about their person.
The Salford trio will set up as ‘mobile laboratory’ at the
festival site in Suffolk, and they promise personalised insight into the trillions
of organisms which live in and on us.
'MinION'
Dr Latimer, who won a Wellcome grant to carry out the work, said:
“We are lucky enough to be among the first research groups to own a ‘Nanopore
MinION’, a USB pen-drive-sized DNA sequencer that is run directly from a laptop.
“It allows us to take DNA sequencing out into the public and
what better venue than a major music festival.”
Joe says festival-goers will have the chance to be ‘sampled’
and to see how DNA can uncover the diversity of life that they harbour.
“It’ll be interesting to see the bacteria people have picked
up, especially at an outdoor festival and we believe people will be fascinated by
their bacterial world and how they it can threaten or preserve health!”
Human experiment
He added: “We tend to associate going to festivals as
getting down and dirty and also bacteria as being something we need to clean or
kill. Neither of these things are necessarily true, and hopefully this human
experiment at Latitude will put things in perspective.”
Tania Harrison, Festival Director said: “I’m really excited
to present the Wellcome Trust programme to Latitude including the Read Your DNA Live event.
For the last four years, we have partnered Wellcome to
create events that explore how science touches all our lives, reaching new
audiences and finding new ways to engage people with ideas and learning.”
Joe, Sarah and Ian will be joined by four PhD students
in their mobile lab in the festival’s Faraway Forest, and the team will also take
to the stage on the closing day to share funny stories and anecdotes from the
world of bacteria.