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But, in the early 2010s, various ecologists began to wonder whether air might contain useful DNA traces beyond those wrapped in such windborne bundles. In 2013, biologists Matt Clark at the Natural History Museum in London and Richard Leggett at the Earlham Institute in Norwich, UK, took air samples in a greenhouse and outside it. …
Europe is dotted with radionuclide-detection stations, which could provide “an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct ecological history and detect ongoing changes”, say Stenberg and his co-authors. …
That application is a focus for Clark and Leggett. Since their first discovery of plant DNA blowing in the air, they have developed technology that can detect known crop pathogens weeks before they cause visible damage — information that could enable more judicious spraying of pesticides, they say. Clark and Leggett launched a spin-off company this year that deploys a technology, AirSeq, which they say could be used to track human and animal diseases or antimicrobial resistance, for example. “We are interested to see what people might do with it,” says Clark.
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Many in the field are wary of the implications of such by-catch. “If breathing is putting your DNA out into the air, how does that bump up against how we think of privacy?,” says Kelly, who co-wrote an article7 in 2023 that calls for a moratorium on the study of human DNA from environmentally sourced samples, until global principles are agreed. Some journals already have a moratorium — such as
Environmental DNA, for which Creer is an editor-in-chief. Creer and others are hoping to create a multidisciplinary group to assess the ethics.
Researchers in other sectors are intrigued by the possibilities. Peter Gill, a forensic geneticist at the University of Oslo, and his colleagues have been assessing airborne DNA caught in offices and air-conditioning units8 for its potential as a forensic tool.
“People who have been recently in a building, within a day or so, you can certainly pick up their DNA” from the air, says Gill. For a longer-term record, he says, there is airborne DNA on surfaces. “You can take the dust from on top of a door sill, where people don’t normally clean. And then you’ll have a sort of mini-historical record of people who have been in there.”
Gill says that airborne DNA could be useful in forensics, provided its limitations are taken into account. These are similar to those of established techniques for analysing DNA from surfaces that have been touched: you need a human-DNA database with which to compare your sample, and a correlation is a probability, not a ‘match’.
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Nature 652, 556-558 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01099-2
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