Excited to share our work on city-wide metagenomic surveillance of hawker centres in Singapore!
Several surprising findings here.
Firstly, in addition to finding microbial DNA, we found plenty of non-microbial DNA, most of which looked like it had a food origin. We used this to identify food-microbe associations.
Secondly, we noticed that each hawker centre seems to have a unique microbial fingerprint, which in some cases can be largely preserved over many years
Finally, we found that hawker centres may be surprisingly enriched for antibiotic resistance genes and clinically-relevant pathogens, in some cases more than even hospital environments!
