The most brazen scientific Easter Egg of all time
The internet never forgets.
At the end of January 2018, a paper, 'Methylation-based enrichment facilitates low-cost, noninvasive genomic scale sequencing of populations from feces,' was published in Scientific Reports.
Seems innocuous enough, right?
In the article the authors describe sequencing animal populations using non-invasive DNA isolation from feces and they developed a methylation based enrichment method to separate the host DNA from all the stuff in the poop.
It's a pretty ingenious method with applications that extend beyond animal populations.
They even had a fun figure, Figure 1, with their research subject, a baboon, and a little turd to illustrate how their method worked.
The figure is really pretty precious.
But it turned scandalous if you zoomed, like, zoomed a lot.
Because on the tip of the high resolution baboon dropping was a monotone image of Donald J. Trump.
Lil' Donny was discovered shortly after the 2018 election and Nature Publishing Group quickly removed the likeness and provided this sanitized explanation:
"In the original version of this Article, there were unusual aspects to the ‘Extract fecal DNA’ illustration in figure 1. These features have been removed."
But, the internet never forgets 'aspects' that are this 'unusual,' and the doody with the Donald lives on.