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by flir 563 days ago
I know nothing about this, so I guess I'm asking "why can't we do this?": take some brain, throw it in a blender, and look for DNA the same way the ancient environmental DNA people do?
4 comments

You can't find out this way. Removing brains exposes it to an outside environment where there are microbes. You can't tell if they arrived before or after you removed the material.

Related recent story about earth microbes colonizing what was hoped to be a pristine sample of astroid captured in space: https://www.space.com/ryugu-asteroid-sample-earth-life-colon...

Maybe the first point you make is also the argument for why our brain might have a microbiome, as our body is not in any way hermetically enclosed, and e.g. amoebas are able to infect our brains just by going through our nose.
Very hard to clean a blender!

More nitpickfully, one of the big things we care about is if the bacteria are living _harmlessly_ in the brain. i.e., site of microbes, and a lack of inflammation, will answer more than just "are there microbes around".

You’d have to get that brain cleanly from the creature to the blender.
Place body in sterile isolator, expose dura mater, DNase treatment of the area, insert sterile syringe into brain? Repeat experiment several times, and also process negative controls.

Not my area. I guess the fact that it hasn't been done proves it's way harder than I'm assuming it is.

From what I understand Joe DeRisi's approach[0] comes relatively close to your "blender" idea!

[0]: I already mentioned Adam Savage's excellent podcast with him elsewhere in this dicussion but here's a direct link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MzzD2F73iGU&t=2s&pp=2AECkAIB