The Extremophile Campaign: In Your Home

Microbial life is (nearly) everywhere - yet only a tiny fraction has ever been studied or documented. It’s an exciting new frontier for exploration and The Extremophile Campaign: In Your Home (ECIYH) is a chance for you to be a part of the discovery! All you need to do is sign up for an CitSci account, join this project, and fill out a survey about things you observe in your own home.

ECIYH is a participatory science campaign led by The Two Frontiers Project (2FP) to explore the fascinating microbial world of extreme environments in and around human homes. By exploring extreme environments in one’s home (think super hot places like the dishwasher or really cold places like near your air conditioner drip tray), you may discover new, previously unstudied microorganisms. These microorganisms may have special talents, such as the ability to fix CO2 in low-nutrient environments, or the ability to live and thrive in a severely dry environment. Join the project today and explore this exciting frontier with us! With your help we will catalog images and descriptions of microorganisms living in low-nutrient conditions in and around human homes. The science team will analyze the catalog of observations you report to determine which of the microbial life to sample. Some samples will be investigated using DNA sequencing of the microbial community and shared in the Two Frontiers Project Living Database for further study by the scientific community.

As a volunteer with this project, you are asked to look in and around your home for any signs of weird microbial growth (think slime, crusty mats, stringy growth), take a picture of it and answer a few questions about what you see. For your first observation, take a picture of your shower head, or the inside of the water tank (not the bowl) of a toilet, or another easy-to-observe place. Then, fill out the datasheet for this project (it only takes a few minutes)! Scientists will be looking at the data frequently and reach out to you if your observation is of an environment that needs to be explored further with cutting-edge sequencing technology. If it is, you’ll be sent a postage-paid sampling kit and instructions for how to collect and mail your sample back for analysis and DNA sequencing.