There are lots of things that happen only at the Minnesota State Fair: Butter busts. Costumed llamas. Traffic-cone-flavored lip balm.
This summer you can add another: Gene sequencing of a corn dog.
University of Minnesota researchers are aiming to crack the genetic code of the quintessential State Fair snack at the school's Driven to Discover research building on the fairgrounds.
It's a lighthearted way to draw attention to the more serious research being done by university scientists to track infectious diseases. Gene sequencing technology is being used at the U for everything from tracking respiratory pathogens, to breeding more productive cows, to developing better cancer treatments.
The corn dog project is the brainchild of Dr. Beth Thielen, assistant professor of pediatrics and an infectious-disease expert at the U of M Medical School, and Christopher Faulk, associate professor of functional genomics at the university's Department of Animal Science.
Thielen is hoping to use the corn dog project to recruit potential participants at the fair for a study formally titled "Prospective Surveillance for Respiratory Pathogens and Antimicrobial Resistance in Diverse Regional Populations: A Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence Collaboration between the Minnesota Department of Health and University of Minnesota."
The informal name for the study is "Got Snot?"
The mission of the study is to follow 500 households in Minnesota and neighboring states, asking them to mail in nasal swabs if they get sick. The researchers will then use the latest gene sequencing technology to figure out which respiratory diseases are emerging and how they're spreading.
"We wanted to show prospective participants how nucleic acid sequencing works and from there the corn dog sequencing experiment was born," Thielen said. "For safety reasons, we didn't think working with actual infectious agents at the fair was a good idea."
All organisms — from respiratory bugs to the once-living ingredients in a corn dog — have genetic material that can be sequenced.
"Since all once-living things have nucleic acid, we figured sequencing a corn dog would be a good tribute to the fair," Thielen said.
But what will they learn about corn dogs?
"So our hypothesis is that a corn dog contains components of formerly living organisms. So there's corn, which has DNA. There's beef, we think," Thielen said. "By reading out the sequences that we get, we can determine the relative proportions of those different materials that contributed to the corn dog in our sample."
Thielen and Faulk will also be showing off advances in gene sequencing equipment.
Instead of large machines costing millions of dollars, the researchers will be bringing to the fairgrounds a sequencing device the size of a Snickers bar that plugs into a laptop and costs less than $2,000.
It's the sort of portable gear Thielen and Faulk will be using overseas if they get funding to expand their emerging pathogen tracking research in places like Uganda, Malaysia and Ecuador.
Could the experiment win an Ig Nobel Prize, the annual Harvard-based ceremony that celebrates offbeat research?
"We can only hope," Thielen said. "All publicity is good publicity. It's a little bit of a fun experiment, but underlying it is an important point which is this is something that's up and coming and has a lot of potential for a lot of areas, and we want people to learn about it and be excited about science."
