Trevor Ghylin : Why I started Microbe Detectives

I founded Microbe Detectives during my PhD work. I was doing a PhD in environmental engineering at UW-Madison, applying a lot of this next-generation DNA sequencing technology to understanding lakes. My professional history was in wastewater consulting and it just seemed like this new DNA technology had a lot of applications in drinking water and wastewater, to help solve microbial issues that we couldn’t solve with these older more standardized tools.

The problem we’re focused on solving is operators of drinking water and wastewater systems are kind of flying blind, regarding microbiology. The tools they’re using are petri dish culturing and microscopes that show them less than 1% of what’s going on in their systems. We’re able to use DNA sequencing to help identify almost 100% of what’s in those samples.