I have worked at a sequencing center before. DNA contamination is easier to mitigate because the lab disposables aren't made out of what you are testing. Disposables are almost always plastic and tend to have minimal DNA contamination. Environmental DNA contamination is largely mitigated with PCR hoods and careful protocols/practices. However, these procedures don't mitigate DNA contamination at the collection level, which is likely where the statistical models you mentioned help.
I can't imagine wafting your hands over the tubes would change the plastic amounts substantially compared to whatever negative controls the papers used. But again, I am not an expert on this kind of analytical chemistry. I always worry more about batch effects. But it does seem like microplastics are becoming the new microbiome.
I haven't really read the studies but shouldn't they have negative controls to negate these effects? Wouldn't that let the author's correct for a baseline contamination level in the lab?
That is how I became serious about programming. I played around a bit but I never really wrote anything useful until I started playing Asheron's Call. I learned C++ to write bots and other plugins for Decal (an embedded mod framework).
There are other examples of oncoviruses including: Epstein-Barr virus and Human herpes virus 8 (Kaposi's Sarcoma).
Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?
There are billions of dollars spent on this problem through huge DNA/RNA/Epigenomics/Chromatin Accessibility sequencing initiatives. There is also a huge amount of model system work such as mouse models.
I played Aardwolf briefly but I mostly stuck to a nightmare/LP MUD that is still around but essentially empty. I learned to code (which ended up being a gateway to C/C++), grief, and be compassionate to new players.
I have a different problem with my M3 Macbook Pro. If I leave chrome (sometimes other apps too) open with the macbook plugged in and the lid closed the computer will get very warm and stay very warm until I unplug it / close chrome.
Edit: It's also not warm when plugged in and using chrome with the lid open.
This is a great analogy. One small change is that there are two ways to reassemble it. One is to try to blindly put the pieces together and fork a teacup (read assembly) vs trying to use a picture of the teacup to figure out where the pieces go (read alignment / mapping)
They didn't sequence the whole human genome (~3 billion bases) for multiple reasons. I am not an expert on ancient DNA but I will try to explain the paper as best I can:
1. Contamination with other flora and fauna DNA
2. Relative low proportions of human DNA
3. The DNA is usually highly degraded, which limits the analyses to short read sequencing (in this case they used 76 bp reads). The halflife of human DNA is ~521 years.
To mitigate these problems they used multiple targeted approaches including one to isolate mitochondrial DNA, where they managed to sequence the whole ~16kb human mtDNA, where each base was covered by 62 sequencing reads on average (62x coverage).
They used another to isolate specific regions containing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are DNA mismatches known to be related to ancient human DNA and humans. They targeted 470,724 single nucleotide polymorphisms of which 70% (336,429) were recovered.
They did perform shotgun sequencing on all of the DNA isolated, but due to species assignment issues they again focused on fragments that contain diagnostic SNPs in these cases they only recovered a small number of SNPs per sample, again due to the relatively low proportion of human DNA and its degradation (20,526, 3,734, 124,862, 85,901, 34,756, 41,632, 34,677 and 72,992) as per the legend in figure 3.
1) Asheron's Call (which had a very active mod scene and now an emulator scene). I don' think the servers are nearly as popular as UO though.
2) Shadowbane (this one was heavily guild based but it was fun being a bit of an outlaw and PvPing random people and guilds).