New cockroach has appeared in New York

A new cockroach seems to have appeared in New York, reveals a study from Rockefeller University, which specializes in medical and biological research.

Under the leadership of Professor Mark Stoeckle, geneticist at Rockefeller University, two high school students acted “like detectives” in the streets of New York and in their apartment to collect 217 the most diverse samples between November 2008 and March 2009.

Supermarket food, insect remains found in a tin of canned pineapple, a feather duster, dried dung, a cockroach: all of these specimens were then sent to the New York Museum of Natural History, which had agreed to participate to this research and to conduct DNA analysis.

The Museum’s laboratory has thus succeeded in identifying a new type of cockroach whose DNA code differs by 4% from the code of the “Periplaneta americana” or “American cockroach”, while the genetic difference between insects of the same category does not not exceed 1%, “Mark Stoeckle told AFP on Wednesday.

“We can therefore suggest that it is a new cockroach”, he added, specifying that this “discovery should be of interest to natural history museums”. And New Yorkers …

Apart from the mysterious cockroach, 95 different animal species have been identified by the Museum’s laboratory, and researchers have concluded that DNA remains identifiable in cooked or dried foods, even in infinitesimal quantities.

“We found ostrich DNA in the feather duster, genetic traces of a giant winged squid in an Asian appetizer, traces of bison in dog food,” they write in their report.

According to them, the most important finding is the fact that “16% of food products on the market are mislabelled, which can be very dangerous, especially in the case of allergies”.

They discovered that goat cheese actually contained cow’s milk, or that a box labeled “sturgeon caviar” contained the genetic fingerprints of a “kind of cuttlefish”.

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