“During a single week in April 2023, the area around Florida’s Washington Oaks Gardens State Park was abuzz. A bobcat passed by, perhaps stalking the eastern gray squirrels. An eastern diamondback rattlesnake slithered through the undergrowth. The spaces among the grand oaks hummed with wildlife—a big brown bat, mosquitoes, and an osprey—and people with African, European, and Asian ancestors.

Scientists didn’t directly see any of these creatures. But they used cutting-edge DNA technology to find evidence of them in tiny specks of organic material floating in the air. A similar analysis of air from the streets of Dublin revealed a far different, but equally rich, tableau of life. Together the work, published today [6/3/25] in Nature Ecology & Evolution, shows the potential of airborne DNA-detection tools to surveil biodiversity, disease-causing microbes, and invasive species…

The new study made use of another approach known as shotgun sequencing, in which all the DNA in a sample is randomly chopped up and billions of the short sequences are “read.” Computer programs spot overlapping bits and reassemble the digital fragments into larger sequences. Some approaches, using recently developed tools called nanopore sequencers, also allow scientists to read long strands of DNA, rather than chopping them into little bits, providing even more complete genetic information. The results can be compared with libraries of distinct genetic sequences for more than half a million species.”

From Science.