Jonathan A. Eisen edited Methods.md  over 9 years ago

Commit id: 45fa2eab463e7813e3b5307a2ac3b954a9f4abaa

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### Do we have any information on how / why they chose particular sites?  These surfaces were chosen in an attempt to sample surfaces analogous to those sampled in the Wildlife of Our Homes project \cite{23717552}. Wildlife of Our Homes was a Citizen Science project for which over 1000 volunteers swabbed nine surfaces in their homes: kitchen cutting board, kitchen counter, a shelf inside a refrigerator, toilet seat, pillowcase, exterior handle of the main door into the house, television screen, the upper door trim on the outside surface of an exterior door, and the upper door trim on an interior door. We were not granted access to all corresponding surfaces aboard the ISS. The kitchen surfaces aboard the ISS are in the Russian module, which we did not have permission to access, swabbing the toilet seat was deemed inappropriate due to ???, and the exterior surfaces are accessible only via an "Extra-vehicular Activity" (Space Walk,) which was not requested for this experiment. We also sought to collect samples that would be analogous to the cell phone and shoe samples that were being obtained from thousands of Citizen Scientists across the country in a different component of Project MERCCURI. See Table 1 for a list of the ISS sampling sites and to which Earth samples they were intended to ba analogous.  Upon completion of the swabbing on April/May ??? (include link to video of actual swabbing?) All swabs were stored at -80 deg C, (IS THIS TRUE? DO YOU KNOW THE TEMP. OF THE FREEZER? SOMEONE TOLD ME ONCE IT WAS NOT -80)  until transfer to the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:05pm PT on May 18, 2014. (DID THEY STAY FROZEN THE WHOLE TIME?)  Samples were transferred by boat to ???, transferred to a cooler with dry ice, and shipped to blah, blah, blah, EMP. Insert description of DNA extraction, PCR, sequencing.