Tyler Murchie

speaker

109 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Tyler Murchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Squirrel poop drops Ice Age clues + The neuroscience of laughter · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

And this is because when using high throughput sequencing technologies, where we get hundreds of millions or billions of DNA sequences for every sample, you have to be able to identify, okay, which samples which, and that took quite a lot of effort, because...

There's so many partially degraded organics in poop that make chemically it quite challenging.

But then after you do all that, you have to then try to pull out the DNA you're interested in, which is a whole other biochemical effort because, you know, 90% of the sample is just DNA that we don't know what it is.

And so that just kind of

gets put into some other bin.

And then of the 10% or so that we can identify, 99.9% of that is bacteria.

And then of the 0.1% that's other stuff is all the other things that are in there.

And we're really interested in here in case of the plants and animals.

Yeah.

So the NCBI, Nucleotide Database, people, their genomicists basically just upload all their DNA data for every organism they've ever discovered.

And it just goes on this database.

We then pull a local copy of this database, which is huge.

Hundreds of millions, or it must be billions of reference genomes on there now at this point.

Maybe not full genomes, but sequences anyway.

And then we one by one, every, you know, 30 little base pair sequence of DNA, ancient DNA that we get, we align it to this gigantic database.

And you have to use high performance computers to run through, you know, these enormous calculations to figure out what everything is.

In this case, it took something like running continuously on four high performance servers at four different universities, three to five months or so of continuous and I was hogging the machines for most of that time.

So it's a lot of data.

Yeah, well, when we first started, I thought, ah, it's going to be mostly ground squirrel DNA and their gut microbiome, so the kind of bacteria and stuff that live in their guts.

But I really wasn't expecting to find woolly mammoth and step bison and horse and wolves and...

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