This episode’s guest is Irena Hwang, whose analysis of salmonella genetic data was featured in the Nov. 17, 2021 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Irena explains how she used the data to inform ProPublica’s investigation into a major salmonella outbreak, how the gene sequences are collected, how to access them, how to make sense of them, and what she learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• NCBI’s Pathogen Detection database
• ProPublica’s investigation
• Irena’s behind-the-scenes explanatory article
• A tool developed by ProPublica to help you when shopping for poultry
• Wikipedia’s entry on next-generation DNA sequencing, also known as “massive parallel sequencing”
• A definition of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), from the National Library of Medicine

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.